Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Josh Bland, ESRC-DTP PhD Researcher, University of Cambridge

As a new season begins, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is making a play for the affections of the nation’s football fans by launching its very own football shirt. It’s a move that has already proven popular among Reform supporters. According to Zia Yusuf, a leading figure in the party, thousands were sold on their first day of retail.

Reform’s move to exploit the cultural capital of football speaks to a wider trend in British society: the explosion of the football shirt as a cultural behemoth.

Quite simply, football shirts are everywhere. They have been incorporated into high fashion as part of the nostalgic 90s “blokecore” trend. They are used by bands such as Oasis and Fontaines DC as forms of branded merchandise. And now they are being mobilised by political movements, such as Palestinian solidarity organisation FC Palestina, to spread specific messaging.

Instead of being merely the domain of football supporters, football shirts have become cultural canvases.

Crucially, I believe football shirts are a symbolic medium that is tailor-made for Reform’s current political purposes. Ahead of the 2029 election Farage’s goal is clear. His aim is to win over and mobilise a largely working-class, provincial voting base who feel alienated by “mainstream” politics.

It appears that Reform see football as a potential weapon in this task. From its origins in the industrial cities of late Victorian England, modern football has long been a central pillar of working-class culture in Britain. In particular, it has played a potent role in binding communities around shared sentiments of local tribalism. Given that Farage’s political campaigning to date has often been based around a narrative of fighting for authentic, local community interests against out-of-touch metropolitan elites, the appeal of football in the context of Reform’s politics seems straightforward.

The efficacy of football shirts as a culturally loaded tool of communication means that Farage and Reform may feel they have found their own iteration of the Maga hat: a way for followers to embody their political allegiances with a loud, brash piece of statement clothing that also signals deep roots in the nation’s working-class culture.

But there’s a level of hypocrisy at work here. In the lead up to the Uefa Euro 2020 championship, Farage denounced the England team for taking the knee before games, imploring them to “keep politics out of football”. This was followed by another episode of public pearl clutching in 2024 when Farage decried England’s kit design for featuring a technicolour version of the England flag that bore “no relationship to St. George’s cross whatsoever”.

Now Reform has produced a shirt that both explicitly politicises football culture and features a turquoise Union Jack.

But beyond the flagrant double standards of the launch, Reform’s move into football merchandise is potentially a political miscalculation, too.

As the Labour party continues to flail, offering no resolution to the country’s gaping inequality or fixes for its failing public services, let alone a cure for the divisiveness that increasingly define contemporary Britain, it feels that the 2029 election will be won and lost in England’s football loving provinces.

Football and pride

Football’s roots in working-class culture, pride in place and patriotism means that the hard right has always seen the sport as fertile ground. In this sense, Reform’s kit launch is part of a long tradition of attempted infiltrations of the game by the hard right. Most notoriously, the National Front used terraces as recruitment grounds in the 1970s and the Football Lads Alliance attempted similar when it launched in 2017.

But here lies the problem for Reform. These attempts have largely failed. Even at the peak of the National Front’s influence in the 1970s and early 80s they only ever succeeded in establishing themselves as a fringe group on the terraces – albeit a noisy and intimidating one – and have often faced fierce and organised anti-fascist resistance.

Equally, the establishment of the Premier League in 1992 has seen professional football in the UK embrace a more cosmopolitan future. Progressive anti-racist organisations such as Kick It Out have gained significant influence. The cast of players and managers who populate elite level football is now impressively international. In short, despite its roots in local working-class communities, British football increasingly embodies many of the globalist, progressive ideals that Farage so vehemently rejects.

Even more crucially, as I have found in my own research on football supporting communities in the north-east, football culture prizes authenticity.

For the communities I work with, support of a football team is starkly different to support of a political cause. It is a form of living, breathing heritage. It is a tradition that is passed between generations of a family like an heirloom. It is a culture within which supporters constantly perform their own authenticity through a lifetime of ritual – match attendance, shirt wearing and suffering with the team through thick and thin.

The transparency of Farage’s hijacking of football culture for his own ends may therefore be his downfall. Farage’s credibility as a voice on football will simply not measure up to supporters’ lofty standards. They will be aware that he has openly declared his love of cricket over football. They will be cognisant of his lack of interest in the game other than when there’s a nationalist point to make. Above all, they will see through his cynical attempts to exploit the symbols of the football supporting culture they cherish so dearly for his own political cause.

Of course football is an everyday working-class tradition. Of course it has huge cultural salience in the provincial constituencies Farage will target to win in the 2029 election. But Reform should take heed that just because football is popular, that doesn’t mean it is inevitably populist.

Josh Bland receives funding from The Economic and Social Science Research Council.

– ref. Football fans will see Nigel Farage’s branded kit for the cynical move it is – https://theconversation.com/football-fans-will-see-nigel-farages-branded-kit-for-the-cynical-move-it-is-263513

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Paul Tucker, Senior Lecturer in Broadcast Production, University of the West of Scotland

The agenda-setting centrepiece of every Edinburgh TV Festival is the MacTaggart lecture, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025. This year’s lecture was delivered by former BBC news director James Harding, and billed as a speech that would examine challenges to truth and trust in the media.

Co-founder of Tortoise Media – the “slow news” organisation that has recently bought The Observer – Harding has enjoyed a long career as a journalist and was also once editor of The Times newspaper.

He isn’t really a “TV person”, so Harding seems a strange choice to deliver the 50th MacTaggart. Why not someone who has TV running through their veins, like presenter and producer Richard Osman? Or someone who might reflect the MacTaggart’s beginnings as part of a festival that sought to offer a Scottish-based perspective to the the London-centric TV industry? Or someone who could at least ask the most pressing question facing TV: does it have any kind of future?

However, the organisers of the Edinburgh TV Festival promised the lecture would be “a provocative, kick-ass and insightful view from a visionary leader”.

However, as you might expect from someone who named their company after the humble tortoise, it was much gentler than that, poking its head out of its shell and gently tearing off some conversational topics rather than ripping into things. That said, the lecture was a passionate defence of the BBC that argued for a drastic increase in its funding.

Harding started by describing the BBC as “the most important source of information in this country and around the world”. It was time for the government to give real independence to the BBC in the same way it did with the Bank of England in 1997.

He expressed concern that as things stand, the BBC chair is in essence appointed by the prime minister with a budget set by the chancellor. He also pointed out that should parliament choose not to renew the charter in 2027, the BBC would cease to exist.

Harding argued for change that would see the BBC chair and board of directors appointed by the board itself (which does seem a somewhat circular process) and then approved by Ofcom. The charter, once renewed, would be open-ended (much like those for universities) and any funding – licence fee or otherwise – would be agreed by an independent panel that impartially advises government and is scrutinised by parliament.

That funding, Harding said, needs to be doubled to allow the BBC to function properly. He cited the iPlayer and Media City in Salford as being bold, successful developments of the kind the BBC can only make when properly financed. He admitted that this rise in funding could not come from an increase in licence fee alone, and said something must be done about the 2.5 million households that currently don’t pay it, underlining his support for the “every household pays” model.

Harding also suggested that the quasi-independent and still-developing work of BBC Studios, and in particular the monetising of the BBC archive, could be ways of increasing income for the corporation.

He made an impassioned plea for the BBC World Service to be properly funded, pointing out that it already has a bigger worldwide audience than Netflix. It could, he said, reach over a billion people in the next decade, fighting misinformation globally and providing a real source of soft power for the UK.

Harding’s arguments as to what the BBC could be in the future are perhaps more daring and contentious. He imagines “a BBC that thinks of itself more as the ‘people’s platform’ as well as a public service broadcaster, one that’s home to more varied thinking, but holds true to standards of truth and accuracy, diversity of opinion and fair treatment of people in the news”.

It would, he said, be an open platform that “would invite the BBC to think not just about how it informs and entertains, but how it educates too” – a kind of YouTube run by BBC editorial policy. This, he summed up, would be “a national investment in our future that will come back to reap multi-platform rewards that an investment in no other UK organisation can”.

I don’t think there is much I would argue with in James Harding’s MacTaggart lecture. I would just ask how all this is actually going to happen – how the debate moves out of the conference rooms of the TV festival. Harding obviously believes in the BBC. Yet when he was editor of The Times, a journalist of influence and power, he couldn’t stop the paper’s – and Rupert Murdoch’s – relentless criticism of the BBC.

We also now have an unofficial government opposition in Reform that believes, as Harding reminded the audience, that the BBC is out of touch and institutionally biased, and will be scrapped by Farage’s party should they come to power.

I agree with Harding that in a fragmented media world we must fight to preserve and properly fund the BBC. But that fight won’t be easy.

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Paul Tucker is a member of The Royal Television Society and a voting member of BAFTA.

– ref. Edinburgh TV festival: James Harding’s MacTaggart lecture is a passionate defence of the BBC – https://theconversation.com/edinburgh-tv-festival-james-hardings-mactaggart-lecture-is-a-passionate-defence-of-the-bbc-263661

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Bleddyn Bowen, Associate Professor in Astropolitics and Space Warfare, School of Government and International Affairs (SGIA), Durham University

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) has become part of the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). The announcement was made on August 20 2025 by Chris Bryant MP, minister of state for data protection and telecoms.

Cutting red tape and duplicative bureaucracy within DSIT and UKSA seems to be the main rationale in the press release – that and bringing “together the people who shape space policy and those who deliver it”.

Though it sounds like a demotion for UKSA, what the changes mean in practice for the crafting of UK space policy, and the direction of UK space policy itself, remain uncertain. More importantly, rearranging the deckchairs of DSIT and UKSA will not resolve the chronic problems facing British space policy.

The first problem is that UKSA has lacked a clear identity and responsibility over policy, regulation and research within civil space activities. It is not like Nasa or the European Space Agency (Esa) – UKSA does not operate satellites, nor conduct major research and development projects by itself.

UKSA has competed with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) over licensing and regulatory powers for satellite launches from the UK, which the CAA has possessed since the mid-2010s.

On research, UKSA acted mostly as a research council, rivalling the work traditionally performed by the UK Research and Innovation’s and Science and Technology Funding Council (STFC).

STFC apportions funding for space science and research for universities and industry. UKSA is also the main point of contact for distributing Esa funding for British industry and university contributions to Europe-wide space projects.

UK space policymaking

UK space policy has always been an interdepartmental and Cabinet Office concern, and UKSA has traditionally only factored into consultations on the regulatory and civil space research dimensions of UK space policies. Since 2021, DSIT has taken on more space policy responsibilities regarding industrial strategy, further eroding a unique role for UKSA.

UKSA therefore has not carved out a clear niche that other departments or executive agencies cannot already claim competency within. The UK government’s position that duplication needs to be addressed is not an unreasonable one. The devil is in the details – which are missing at this time.

It is hard to say whether the bureaucratic changes will be better or worse for the creation and implementation of civil UK space policy and space science research.

The optics of this move can be easily seen and inaccurately spun as a negative in cancelling the UK space programme. No actual space projects are being cancelled.

The UK government has clearly recognised this, stressing that UKSA will retain a distinctive and recognisable branding in its new role, which has been effective at home and abroad in space science, industry promotion, and facilitating high-profile projects.

The second chronic problem that pre-dates UKSA – and will continue regardless of the musical chairs in Whitehall – is the lack of a coherent, joined-up national UK space programme with the funding to match. UKSA could never resolve these problems.

For example, the UK government has long pursued a policy of encouraging small satellite launch companies, yet has never allocated the funds necessary to deliver a tangible capability within any reasonable schedule, nor has it created a national UK satellite programme (civil or military) tailored to a high latitude launch profile, which could in turn create concrete demand for such a launcher.

After 15 years of drift, UK launch has gone from being ahead of the curve in Europe (with UK-based companies such as Skyrora and Orbex) to falling behind France, Sweden, or Spain as possibly the first new European small satellite launch providers.

This is a basic lesson in space programme design that seems lost on generations of British policymakers, but one that established satellite launching countries have taken to heart.

Modestly sized space powers have focused on crucial long-term national capability programmes and stumped up the cash for them, such as France’s Spot or India’s Insat programme. Such priorities are not evident in the UK across the civil and military space sectors.

As I explained to the UK House of Lords Select Committee’s UK Engagement with Space inquiry earlier this year, British space policy spreads out too little money in too many directions on small research projects rather than bold national infrastructural space programmes.

The government must also consider the security and military dimensions of space, which cannot exclude UKSA or the civil, industrial and research dimensions as they in turn provide the capability and know how to build British space systems.

The Boris Johnson government formed the National Space Council to drive and coordinate these partnerships, yet it was abolished by the Truss government and reinstated during the Sunak government. There have been no announcements from the Starmer government yet on any meetings of the council. This bureaucratic chaos has not helped efforts to cohere a strategic direction in space.

While the Ministry of Defence claims it wishes to invest in all manner of new space capabilities in the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, it cannot do so without a large injection of new funding, far beyond the billions already allocated for the military satellite Skynet 6 and defence satellite system ISTARI. More than funding, a clear decision on a specific capability is needed, rather than doing a little bit of everything.

Developing one kind of new satellite constellation, such as radar imagery for military operational needs – numbering in dozens of new satellites – would be the biggest undertaking for the MoD in space since the Skynet satellite communications system.

Doing the same for other capabilities at the same time, such as optical imagery, signals intelligence, or laser communications relays, would be as big a challenge again, and perhaps too much to take on at the same time.

For space policy wonks, academic researchers and the space industry, this rearrangement will not change much in the short term – for good and bad. UKSA was never fully independent to begin with, so the changes are likely to be more esoteric, subtle and bureaucratic.

That would require courageous policy decisions at the top of government to deliver a coherent, focused, joined-up and fully funded UK civil and defence space programmes.

These are the author’s own views and not that of any institution or organisation.

– ref. The UK Space Agency has been absorbed into the science department. The potential effects are still unclear – https://theconversation.com/the-uk-space-agency-has-been-absorbed-into-the-science-department-the-potential-effects-are-still-unclear-263563

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jason Gilchrist, Lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University

Most people imagine our early primate ancestors swinging through lush tropical forests. But new research shows that they were braving the cold.

As an ecologist who has studied chimpanzees and lemurs in the field in Uganda and Madagascar, I am fascinated by the environments that shaped our primate ancestors. These new findings overturn decades of assumptions about how – and where – our lineage began.

The question of our own evolution is of fundamental importance to understanding who we are. The same forces that shaped our ancestors also shape us, and will shape our future.

The climate has always been a major factor driving ecological and evolutionary change: which species survive, which adapt and which disappear. And as the planet warms, lessons from the past are more relevant than ever.

The cold truth

The new scientific study, by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and other researchers, maps the geographic origins of our primate ancestors and the historical climate at those locations. The results are surprising: rather than evolving in warm tropical environments as scientists previously thought, it seems early primates lived in cold and dry regions.

These environmental challenges are likely to have been crucial in pushing our ancestors to adapt, evolve and spread to other regions. It took millions of years before primates colonised the tropics, the study shows. Warmer global temperatures don’t seem to have sped up the spread or evolution of primates into new species. However, rapid changes between dry and wet climates did drive evolutionary change.

One of the earliest known primates was Teilhardina, a tiny tree dweller weighing just 28 grams – similar to the smallest primate alive today, Madame Berthae’s mouse lemur. Being so small, Teilhardina had to have a high-calorie diet of fruit, gum and insects.

Fossils suggest Teilhardina differed from other mammals of the time as it had fingernails rather than claws, which helped it grasp branches and handle food – a key characteristic of primates to this day. Teilhardina appeared around 56 million years ago (about 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs) and species dispersed rapidly from their origin in North America across Europe and China.

It is easy to see why scientists had assumed primates evolved in warm and wet climates. Most primates today live in the tropics, and most primate fossils have been unearthed there too.

But when the scientists behind the new study used fossil spore and pollen data from early primate fossil environs to predict the climate, they discovered that the locations were not tropical at the time. Primates actually originated in North America (again, going against what scientists had once believed, partly as there are no primates in North America today).

Some primates even colonised Arctic regions. These early primates may have survived seasonally cold temperatures and a consequent lack of food by living much like species of mouse lemur and dwarf lemur do today: by slowing down their metabolism and even hibernating.

Challenging and changeable conditions are likely to have favoured primates that moved around a lot in search of food and better habitat. The primate species that are with us today are descended from these highly mobile ancestors. Those less able to move didn’t leave any descendants alive today.

From past to future

The study demonstrates the value of studying extinct animals and the environment they lived in. If we are to conserve primate species today, we need to know how they are threatened and how they will react to those threats. Understanding the evolutionary response to climate change is crucial to conserving the world’s primates, and other species beyond.

When their habitats are lost, often through deforestation, primates are prevented from moving freely. With smaller populations, restricted to smaller and less diverse areas, today’s primates lack the genetic diversity to adapt to changing environments.

But we need more than knowledge and understanding to save the world’s primate species, we need political action and individual behaviour change, to tackle bushmeat consumption – the main reason primates are hunted by humans – and reverse habitat loss and climate change. Otherwise, all primates are at risk of extinction, ourselves included.

To learn more about primate diversity, behaviour, and threats to their survival, see Monkeys: Our Primate Family, as the exhibition ends its international tour with a return to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Jason Gilchrist 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. Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics – https://theconversation.com/our-primate-ancestors-evolved-in-the-cold-not-the-tropics-263236

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexander Stoffel, Lecturer in International Politics, Queen Mary University of London

Authenticity, everyone’s looking for it, yet it seems nowhere to be found. From the political arena to pop culture to relationships, our obsessive search for authenticity is a symptom of its absence.

We have many terms to describe insincerity and inauthenticity in the age of social media. There’s virtue signalling, which is presenting yourself as aligning with an opinion, cause or social justice movement in order to look good while not really caring about it. There’s also queerbaiting, a term used to describe a person (often a celebrity) who acts as though they were queer without publicly identifying as such, often to attract an LGBTQ+ audience. And, most recently, the trope of the “performative male” seems to have sprung up.

You might catch a performative male ostentatiously reading Sally Rooney in public, while sipping a matcha latte and wearing wired headphones and a pair of Birkenstocks with socks. His profile picture on dating apps might show him holding a baby, and he probably likes to talk about his dog. His interests, gestures and style are all meant to convey a progressive political sensibility and an artistic aesthetic.

In a world where Andrew Tate is a role model and young men are being radicalised to the right, a guy quoting the black feminist scholar bell hooks over a kombucha feels like a minor miracle to many. So why are people online being snarky about men attempting to embody a reconstructed masculinity?

Dating today can feel like a mix of endless swipes, red flags and shifting expectations. From decoding mixed signals to balancing independence with intimacy, relationships in your 20s and 30s come with unique challenges. Love IRL is the latest series from Quarter Life that explores it all.

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Well, if you trust the pages of Cosmopolitan or The New York Times, it’s all “just” a performance. And what’s worse, these men are actively trying to manipulate women into believing that they’d actually be caring and progressive partners.

This raises the question: What are we asking of men exactly? That they go back to posting gym selfies and Jordan Peterson quotes? I’m not convinced that it’s “embarrassing” when straight men try to appear as “good guys”. In fact, men reading feminist literature, openly expressing their feminine side and embracing caregiving roles all strike me as pretty hopeful things.

Now, some might say that this is not what these men are really like. But treating every stranger with deep suspicion is an existentially depressing way to go through life. Our default position shouldn’t be to relate to men as manipulators. This puts them in an impossible position.

Others might insist that a man’s social media is only about keeping up an appearance. But of course it is. That’s exactly what social media and dating apps are: self-branding tools. The irony is that we’re expected to create an authentic yet also rigorously curated presentation of ourselves.

It makes sense to complain about how shallow social media is. It makes less sense to blame individual men for social media’s shallowness. Social media highlights what has always been true about gender.

Anyone who’s ever taken a gender studies class will have heard the line, “gender is performative”. The insight here is that there is no such thing as an “authentic male”. There are only different performances of masculinity. What people are commenting on when they call someone a “performative male” is simply a different kind of performance that is less traditional and less naturalised.

We should also ask ourselves what kind of culture we create when we see the world as teeming with performative males, queerbaiters and virtue signallers. Assuming every man with a tote bag is a con artist breeds a culture of surveillance, paranoia, distrust, and the creepy belief that strangers owe us details of their private lives.

The notion that most men are just fraudsters, cynically posing as well-intentioned to deceive women, creates a toxic public environment. Its effects become most visible when celebrities like Kit Connor are forced to come out to dispel suspicions about the authenticity of their gender or sexuality.

This online authenticity discourse is all the more insidious when it cloaks itself in the language of feminism while mocking performances of non-traditional masculinity. In this sense, it shares features of what gender scholar Asa Seresin has termed “heteropessimism”: a way of voicing legitimate frustrations with heterosexuality, dating and men that looks progressive but does nothing to address them.

Desire is always an uncertain business. We find it difficult and unsettling because it sits somewhere between fantasy and reality, between appearance and truth, between representation and essence. But writing off all “good guys” as manipulators won’t do away with this difficulty. We can’t stop men from performing. At least let them audition.

Alexander Stoffel 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. Let ‘performative males’ be – gender has always been a performance and our need for authenticity is bad for us – https://theconversation.com/let-performative-males-be-gender-has-always-been-a-performance-and-our-need-for-authenticity-is-bad-for-us-263478