Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

As the UK prepares for the budget announcement, familiar debates are taking shape. Should Chancellor Rachel Reeves cut welfare spending? Or reform the “triple lock” on state pensions?

Other debates focus on revenue: how should she raise money without breaking Labour’s manifesto promise not to increase taxes on working people? But these discussions are being held in a strange vacuum, where the three enormous expenditures that led the UK to this point are not mentioned.

COVID debt, energy support schemes and Brexit have fundamentally shaped the UK’s financial woes. Yet voters and politicians alike seem determined not to talk about them. Instead, they’re treated as shocks imposed on the country, although they involved hugely consequential political choices.

Gloomy vibes accompany this Advent budget, and Britain’s awkward collective amnesia is preventing the country from learning the lessons needed for future crises and from talking honestly about the best route forward.

The ghost of COVID past

The COVID pandemic required unprecedented government intervention. Between 2020 and 2022, the UK’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates, support measures totalled £169 billion or 7% of UK GDP. Most of it (£100 billion) went on direct support for things like the furlough scheme.

In hindsight, the vaccine roll-out was one key moment when the country showed its ability to deliver on a massive scale. Some other decisions were less glorious.

There was a general lack of transparency in the purchase of health equipment during the first wave of the pandemic, and the Eat Out to Help Out scheme to support hospitality led to a further increase in infections..

But there is very little discussion of the most important, unanswered questions. Despite a long inquiry examining government failings, there has been no debate about how much risk we as a country are willing to take, and how much we are willing to pay in order to reduce that risk.

COVID support schemes increased public debt from 80.4% of GDP in 2018 to 107.4% in 2021. The government paid close to zero interest on the debt at the time.

But now, higher interest rates make it a huge burden on taxpayers. Debt interest spending is higher than the budget for education, more than twice as big as it was in 2018. This is why Reeves now appears so determined to bring down UK debt levels.

We also know the cost lockdowns put on schoolchildren. But we know very little about the cost of doing less, or the current choice to stop vaccinating people.

Perhaps the main hit on UK budget capacity comes from a global pandemic, something that will happen again in the future. The focus is on putting the finances back on track without discussing how to manage similar trade-offs next time.

The ghost of our present energy transition

When Russia invaded Ukraine and energy prices spiked, the UK faced a choice: reduce demand or subsidise consumption. It chose the latter. The government stepped in with massive support packages to pay people’s energy bills. This cost £78.2 billion, or more than 4% of GDP (compared to less than 3% on average in Europe).

There were strong arguments for this approach. Allowing fuel poverty to spike during a cost-of-living crisis would have been terrible, and there was little time to target the policy. But to be clear about what happened: the public was given huge handouts to avoid having to change lifestyles, technology or consumption patterns.

This happened in the middle of an energy transition. The goal, ostensibly, is to decarbonise, reduce dependence to fossil fuels from dictators, and to modernise infrastructure.

These are complex decisions that require public support, some level of sacrifice, but also a clear collective commitment that change is inescapable. But this is not how the country is approaching these challenges, having just demonstrated that when energy costs rise the government will step in.

Just like COVID debt, UK taxpayers carry the cost of energy support debt while sweeping the decisions that caused it under the rug.

The ghost of Brexit yet to be

The UK’s relationship to Brexit appears more confused than ever. Only 11% of British adults think Brexit is more a success than a failure, and 56% would vote to rejoin the EU. Yet many tout Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as the frontrunner to be the next prime minister while also blaming him (among others) for Brexit’s failures.

This may be because Brexit has largely disappeared from the public’s radar, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer starts to move towards more integration with the EU.

Conversations on the topic tend to do everything to avoid reopening old wounds. But economists are slowly realising the full extent of the damage caused to the economy. An unprecedented comprehensive study relying on comparisons with other nations and also on detailed data from Bank of England business surveys estimates that Brexit has reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%. These figures were at the most pessimistic end of the estimates at the time of the referendum.

To put this into perspective, with UK tax receipts at 40% of GDP, a GDP that was 7% higher would give £77 billion extra a year to the chancellor. This is more than half of the 2024-25 budget deficit of £137 billion.

Yet, there has been no massive trade deal with the US and no attempt to replace the EU in any major way. The UK is paying a hefty price for having chosen one of the hardest possible versions of Brexit, but is yet to define what economic gain this could bring.

COVID debt, energy support and the Brexit deficit are the three ghosts that will haunt this budget – ghosts that no one wants to face. The UK cannot prepare for future pandemics without learning from how it handled COVID.

It will not complete its energy transition without confronting the choices made about who bears the costs of energy security. And it will not develop a coherent economic strategy without assessing what to do with Brexit. Until the UK faces up to these issues, it will be left discussing minor austerity measures and hoping for a Christmas miracle.

Renaud Foucart 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. The three spectres hanging over Rachel Reeves’ make-or-break budget – https://theconversation.com/the-three-spectres-hanging-over-rachel-reeves-make-or-break-budget-270388

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, University of Edinburgh

The UK was one of the most locked down countries in the world during the COVID pandemic, but this was not inevitable – it was a failure of public health policy.

That should be the lasting legacy of the UK COVID inquiry’s latest report, not a critique of politicians no longer in office.

In a public health emergency, saving lives will always be the first priority, but even as COVID raged, it was never a binary choice between harsher restrictions or more deaths. The choice was between different ways to protect people from a dangerous virus.

In 2020, governments that had never previously contemplated lockdowns imposed them anyway. On March 23, the UK population was ordered to stay at home, without any assessment of how much harm this would do to the economy, education, access to healthcare and the wellbeing of everyone – especially children.

The vast scale of the resulting damage shows why avoiding lockdowns must be a priority for policymakers in future pandemics.

I gave evidence to that effect to the COVID inquiry myself. I also listened to testimony from politicians, officials, doctors and epidemiologists. But I heard surprisingly little about how COVID could have been tackled without lockdowns, even though everyone has had years to reflect on this question.

Instead, witness after witness argued that the problem with the March 2020 lockdown was that it came too late. Matt Hancock, the UK’s then health minister, thought it should have come three weeks earlier, but one week was the majority view.

So, the inquiry was justified in making that point in their report. Backing it up with the claim, based on a mathematical model, that it would have saved more than 20,000 lives is more contentious. Historians distrust counterfactuals, and it makes no difference if one is expressed in equations rather than words.

Despite making that claim, the inquiry doesn’t like lockdowns. “Far from it,” said the inquiry’s chair, Baroness Hallett, when she introduced her report. She explained that if action had been taken earlier, then lockdowns “might not have been necessary at all”.

That’s correct: earlier action can be less drastic action. There is no need for draconian measures intended to drive down the number of cases if you don’t let them rise in the first place.

More moderate precautions from respiratory hygiene to self-isolation of people with COVID were enough to keep essential services going, even to make professional sports possible, long before there were vaccines. Next time, basic interventions must be identified more quickly, and rolled out faster and wider than they were in 2020.

The inquiry’s report also concludes that more should have been done to protect those most vulnerable to COVID: the elderly, frail and infirm. This should have been the priority throughout, but it was overshadowed by lockdown — a strategy that did not do enough to protect care home residents, who faced far greater risks than the children no longer able to go to school.

“Cocooning”, ensuring those around them are virus free, is the most effective way of protecting the vulnerable. The cumbersome PCR tests used early in the pandemic were not ideal for this purpose. Lateral flow devices were far better, yet this straightforward technology was not largely deployed for almost two years.

When advisers stop offering alternatives

The next pandemic may be different from COVID, so more generic lessons must be learned too. The most pressing one is why it took so long to intervene effectively, with February 2020 described as a “lost month”.

The inquiry concluded that the quality of the UK’s political leadership was a major barrier, but when the next pandemic arrives, it will again be a case of whoever is in the hot seat. Other considerations are more controllable.

Much better preparedness planning, real-time data collection, and competent public health agencies are all important. So are more resilient national health services, though their current state makes that harder to deliver.

Then there is the approach to giving scientific advice. I write as a former member of COVID advisory committees to the UK and Scottish governments, and the inquiry report describes my attempts to push for strong and urgent action from mid-January 2020. That I failed is no surprise; throughout that period, the UK’s highest-level advisory committee, Sage, was not conveying the same sense of urgency, to the despair of some of its own members.

As the pandemic progressed, there were repeated tensions between a government that did not want to go back into lockdown and advisers who were now reluctant to suggest anything else. I heard senior scientists tell the inquiry that the test, trace and isolate scheme had limited potential, that cocooning was too difficult, mass testing would not deliver, and localised restrictions were insufficient.

The few witnesses who rejected this counsel of despair were in a clear minority.
Yet all these interventions succeeded at other times or places.

Given what it had been told, the best the inquiry could do was endorse an abbreviated form of lockdown called a circuit-breaker; it was all that was left on the table. The COVID pandemic might have played out differently if advisers had engaged more constructively with alternatives to lockdown at the time.

This matters because policy should be informed by science but not driven by scientific advisers presenting limited options. It’s patronising to act as though policymakers will be paralysed into inaction if they hear more than one idea. Yet a senior adviser told the inquiry that advisers should “err on the side of giving unequivocal advice earlier”.

Buried deep in the report are two recommendations that point in the opposite direction. First, advisory committees should be more diverse and entertain a wider range of views. Second, they should seek to give the government options.

Last week’s COVID inquiry report fuels a vital debate that was difficult to have in 2020, even among advisers. If that makes lockdowns less likely when the next pandemic arrives, then the exercise will have been worthwhile.

Mark Woolhouse holds grants from the European Union and the Wellcome Trust. He was previously a member of the UK’s advisory group on modelling SPI-M-O, the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 Advisory Group and Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness. He has been a consultant for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness. He wrote a book on the pandemic response, The Year The World Went Mad (Sandstone Press, 2022), which has been entered into evidence by the UK Covid Inquiry.

– ref. Inquiry says COVID lockdowns could have been avoided – they’re right – https://theconversation.com/inquiry-says-covid-lockdowns-could-have-been-avoided-theyre-right-269827

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Graham Taylor, Associate Professor in Viral and Tumour Immunology, University of Birmingham

Around 5 million people worldwide live with the autoimmune condition lupus. This condition can cause a range of symptoms, including tiredness, fever, joint pain and a characteristic butterfly-shaped rash across the cheeks and nose.

For some people, these symptoms are mild and only flare-up occassionally. But for others, the disease is more severe – with constant symptoms

Although researchers know that lupus is caused by the immune system mistakenly attacking the body’s own tissues and organs, it isn’t entirely clear what triggers this response. But a new study suggests a common virus may play a key role in lupus.

There are two main forms of lupus. Discoid lupus primarily affects the skin, while systemic lupus erythematosus – the most common form of lupus – is more severe and affects the organs.

The immune system’s B cells play a key role in systemic lupus. B cells normally produce proteins called antibodies to target pathogens such as viruses and bacteria. But in people with systemic lupus, some B cells produce antibodies, called autoantibodies, that instead bind to and damage their own organs.

What causes B cells to produce autoantibodies in people with systemic lupus is poorly understood. But this recent study suggests that the trigger may be a common virus.

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infects most people worldwide. Infection with EBV most commonly occurs in childhood, when it usually goes unnoticed. But if a person becomes infected by EBV in adolescence, it can cause infectious mononucleosis (better known as glandular fever).

EBV is a type of herpes virus. These are complex viruses that are able to escape the body’s immune response by hiding inside certain cells. In these cells, herpes viruses switch off their genes and go silent – like submarines diving beneath the waves to hide from the enemy. This allows herpes viruses to persist throughout a person’s lifetime – occasionally reawakening to spread to new people.

Interestingly, EBV has evolved to hide within the immune system itself, infecting and persisting in a very small number of B cells. This strategy has proven highly successful for EBV. Over 90% of adults around the world are infected with EBV – meaning the virus is hiding in their immune system’s B cells.

While most people experience no adverse consequences from their infection, EBV has been linked to certain diseases.

For instance, EBV was the first virus shown to cause cancer. Subsequent research has linked EBV to several different types of cancer – including certain lymphomas and 10% of stomach cancers. Each year, about 200,000 people develop an EBV-associated cancer.

More recently, large epidemiological studies have linked EBV with multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune condition. Studies have shown that people with multiple sclerosis are almost always infected with EBV.

Previous research has also suggested that EBV may be involved in systemic lupus. But this new study provides insight into the specific mechanism involved.

To conduct their study, the researchers developed a sensitive test to analyse the genetic material in thousands of B cells isolated from the blood of people with systemic lupus and healthy donors as a control.

They found that EBV was present in around 25 times more B cells in systemic lupus patients compared to participants who didn’t have the condition. In systemic lupus patients, EBV was present in around one in 400 B cells – while in healthy controls it was only present in around one in 10,000 B cells.

This is an interesting finding – though the researchers acknowledge it could potentially be caused by the medicines patients with systemic lupus take to control their illness. These decrease the activity of the immune system which reduces the symptoms of systemic lupus. But these medicines also reduce the immune system’s ability to control EBV infection.

The most important finding from the research was that many of the EBV-infected B cells from systemic lupus patients made autoantibodies that bound to specific proteins. These same proteins are often targeted by autoantibodies in people with systemic lupus. In contrast, EBV-infected B cells from healthy donors did not make these autoantibodies.

To understand the mechanisms involved, the researchers then studied the expression of EBV genes in the infected B cells. Although EBV was generally shown to be in its silent state, some EBV-infected B cells from systemic lupus patients produced the viral protein EBNA2, which reprogrammed the B cells to become more inflammatory. These activated B cells were better able to stimulate responses from other immune cells, including non-EBV infected B cells and T cells.

Together, these observations suggest that EBV may initiate systemic lupus by infecting and reprogramming dormant B cells to become activated. These cells produce autoantibodies that could potentially contribute to the development of systemic lupus. They also appear to recruit additional immune cells able to produce stronger autoimmune responses that are more likely to play a role in systemic lupus development.

EBV infection

These new findings raise the possibility that targeting EBV could form the basis of a new therapy to treat people with systemic lupus. But given these infected B cells also recruit additional immune cells, a broader therapeutic strategy may be needed.

Additional research will also be needed to confirm whether EBV is indeed an essential trigger for the development of systemic lupus. If this is confirmed, preventing EBV infections through vaccination could prevent systemic lupus developing.

Currently there are a number of potential EBV vaccines in development – and two candidates are being tested in large clinical trials. A key requirement for any effective EBV vaccine will be its ability to generate long-term protection against infection. This is because EBV is already widespread in the population. If vaccination only delays infection until later in life, then this could lead to many cases of glandular fever.

The results of these trials are eagerly anticipated, given the potential impact an effective vaccine could have to reduce the numbers of people worldwide that develop lupus, other autoimmune conditions, or cancers caused by EBV.

Graham Taylor has previously received funding from Cancer Research UK, Blood Cancer UK, the UK Medical Research Council, Melanoma UK, and the University of Birmingham to support his research team. This funding has no relation to the content of this article.

Heather Long currently receives funding from Medical Research Council, Kidney Research UK and Rosetrees. This funding has no relation to the content of this article.

– ref. Lupus may be triggered by a common virus – new research – https://theconversation.com/lupus-may-be-triggered-by-a-common-virus-new-research-270309

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ala Sirriyeh, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Lancaster University

The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced plans for the biggest overhaul of the UK asylum system in decades. Some of the harshest criticism of the proposals has come from Labour peer Lord Alf Dubs, a former child refugee who came to Britain on the Kindertransport from Prague in 1939. He has said that the home secretary is seeking to “use children as a weapon”.

There is a long history of refugee children becoming moral touchstones in debates around asylum. For example, photos of the body of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, during the 2015 so-called refugee crisis, were a catalyst for an unprecedented outpouring of compassion among media, the public and politicians.

In the year ending June 2025, there were 88,738 asylum applications to the UK relating to 111,084 people. Of these, 15,123 were child dependents (children who are included on a parent’s asylum application).

Other children enter through family reunion visas once their parent has gained refugee status. In 2024, 10,728 family reunion visas were granted to children under the age of 18. However in September 2025, in the face of growing public discontent with the asylum system, the government paused new applications for family reunion from refugees.

Under the new plans, refugees will not be allowed to apply for family reunion, unless they are able to transfer to a work or study visa.

Removing support

The UK currently has a legal duty to provide accommodation to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute. The government argues that this incentivises people to make dangerous journeys across the English Channel, including with babies and children.

Labour minister Steve Reed has claimed that the new system would remove such incentives and save lives. This is a familiar justification for restrictive asylum policies and an example of what I call “compassionate refusals”, whereby politicians argue that the removal of support or the infliction of punitive measures will alleviate suffering or avoid future suffering.

The Home Office says that the current system allows people to “exploit the fact that they have had children and put down roots in order to thwart removal”.
Currently, destitute families with children who are refused asylum and have exhausted their appeal rights can continue to receive accommodation and basic financial support. Under the new plans, the Home Office will look to remove financial support from families who have been refused asylum, even if they have children.

The most significant change appears to be in the government’s approach to removals. Currently, families are not prioritised by the government for deportation. “Our hesitancy around returning families creates particularly perverse incentives,” the proposals say. “To some, the personal benefit of placing a child on a dangerous small boat outweighs the considerable risks of doing so.”

Under the plans, people refused asylum, including children, could be deported if they fail to leave voluntarily.

For families who are granted asylum, the proposals also introduce a new level of uncertainty. Refugee status will be reassessed every 30 months, with the possibility of being returned to their country of origin if it is deemed safe. Some will have to wait 20 years instead of the current five years before they can apply for settlement.

This means that refugees brought to the UK as children could live their entire childhoods in Britain with no guarantee that they will remain in the place they have come to think of as home.

Facial recognition

Specific measures also focus on unaccompanied child asylum applicants. In the year ending June 2025, 3,553 unaccompanied children applied for asylum. They are looked after by local authorities in foster care, or shared semi-independent accommodation with social work support.

A recurring aspect of debate over asylum has to do with arrivals who are age disputed – that is, those who claim to be under 18, but may be older. The assumption is that they claim to be younger to try to access temporary leave to remain, services and support provided to minors. In the year ending June 2024, 6,270 age disputes were raised.

Under the new asylum plan, young people whose age is disputed will be subjected to facial age estimation technology. This technology uses artificial intelligence to estimate the age of the young person, despite concerns about its accuracy.

This issue of age disputes has been under regular media scrutiny, most notably when 220 children were transferred to the UK in late 2016 from Calais. As these (predominantly teenage) boys arrived in Britain, media headlines disputed their age, focusing on appearance such as facial hair and demeanour. Such an approach can reinforce Eurocentric understandings of age, and ignore the toll that conflict and arduous journeys take on bodies and behaviour.

According to current Home office guidance, when claiming asylum, if the young person claims to be a minor they should be treated as such unless their physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggests they are significantly over the of 18. There have previously been calls to use invasive or discredited methods of age testing such as dental examinations and bone scans.

Currently, if a young person is age disputed, they are usually referred to the local authority who conducts a holistic age assessment. This takes into account appearance, demeanour, documents, the young person’s own account and observations by adults working with them, among other evidence. Given the uncertainties over the use of AI, introducing this technology to the age determination process is unlikely to resolve the existing challenges.

Ala Sirriyeh receives funding from the British Academy

– ref. How new asylum policies will affect child refugees – https://theconversation.com/how-new-asylum-policies-will-affect-child-refugees-270118

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jenna Cash, Lecturer, School of Regeneration and Repair, University of Edinburgh

Millions of people around the world live with wounds that simply won’t heal. These long-lasting wounds, often caused by diabetes, poor circulation or pressure, can be painful, prone to infection and can seriously affect quality of life. In severe cases, they can lead to amputation.

Current treatments help manage symptoms, but they don’t always address the underlying problem. That means dressings, antibiotics and repeated clinic visits, often for months or years. For many people, that cycle never truly ends.

But the latest research published by my colleagues and myself offers a new perspective on why some wounds just won’t heal – and points to a potential new way of treating them.

By studying both human tissue and experimental models, we found that a molecule in the skin called MC1R is consistently disrupted in chronic wounds. When we stimulated this molecule, the skin was able to reduce inflammation and begin healing again.

MC1R is best known for something quite different from wound healing: the gene is responsible for red hair and very fair skin. But MC1R does far more than influence pigment.

MC1R is found on many different types of skin cells, including immune cells, keratinocytes (the cells that form the outer layer of the skin), fibroblasts (the cells that make scar tissue) and the cells that line blood vessels. This means MC1R can influence several parts of the healing process.

The healing process is more complex than simply “closing” a wound. The skin first triggers inflammation (the body’s early defence response that removes microbes and damaged tissue), then gradually turns that inflammation off to allow repair. When that switch-off fails, wounds can remain inflamed for months.

Because MC1R has known anti-inflammatory roles in other conditions such as arthritis, we wanted to know whether its behaviour might also help explain why chronic wounds fail to heal.

To answer this, we used two complementary approaches. First, we analysed human tissue samples from three major types of chronic wounds: diabetic foot ulcers, venous leg ulcers and pressure ulcers. Despite having different causes, these wounds showed a similar problem: the mechanism that normally helps calm inflammation was disrupted. Both MC1R and its natural partner molecule, POMC, were also out of balance – and this imbalance was present across all wound types.

Second, we used experimental models to understand how this disruption affects healing. We examined mice that carry a non-functional version of MC1R. These animals developed wounds that were slow to heal and showed some of the same features we see in human chronic wounds.

Their wounds contained many inflammatory immune cells and abundant “neutrophil extracellular traps” – sticky webs of DNA and proteins that, when they persist, are associated with ongoing inflammation and delayed repair.

To better replicate human chronic wounds, we also created a new mouse model that produces slow-healing, inflammation-rich ulcers. This allowed us to test potential treatments in conditions that closely mimic human disease.

When we applied a topical drug that selectively activates MC1R, healing improved dramatically. The ulcers produced less exudate (the fluid that often leaks from chronic wounds), blood-vessel growth increased (improving the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the wound bed) and the outer layer of skin began to recover and close over the wound. Importantly, activating MC1R reduced neutrophil extracellular traps and limited the arrival of new inflammatory cells.

We also applied the drug to a small cut on healthy animals. Stimulating MC1R further boosted blood flow, improved lymphatic drainage and reduced scarring. This suggests MC1R supports healing not only when wounds are stuck, but also under normal conditions.

Together, these findings indicate that MC1R plays a meaningful role in coordinating several key aspects of skin repair. When the pathway is disrupted, inflammation persists. When MC1R is activated, that inflammation can resolve and allow other healing processes to progress.

Healing chronic wounds

Chronic wounds affect millions of people – and the numbers are rising alongside global rates of diabetes, ageing and obesity. They’re also extremely costly for healthcare systems. Even small improvements in healing could make a significant difference to patients and reduce strain on services.

Our findings raise the possibility of new treatments that target MC1R to help the skin move out of a chronic inflammatory state. Because we saw positive effects with a topical application, future therapies might take the form of ointments or gels that patients could apply themselves.

While more research is needed, identifying MC1R as a key pathway disrupted in chronic wounds gives us a clearer understanding of why some wounds fail to heal – and offers hope for finding new ways to help the skin repair itself.

Jenna Cash receives funding from the Wellcome Trust, Royal Society and the British Skin Foundation. She has provided consulting services for third parties including pharmaceutical companies.

– ref. Red hair and fair skin gene may also play role in healing chronic wounds – new research – https://theconversation.com/red-hair-and-fair-skin-gene-may-also-play-role-in-healing-chronic-wounds-new-research-268915

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, Lecturer, School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer has sold to an anonymous phone bidder for US$236.4 million (£180.88 million) at Sotheby’s New York. Only Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi has achieved a higher hammer price. For modern art, Klimt is the uncontested champion.

What’s more, this record was achieved despite a cooling global art market, and with Klimt lacking the universal household recognition of Da Vinci in much of the world.

The painting is valued so highly because it carries a deep personal and political history – and because the artist’s incredible skill once helped it serve as a life-saving disguise.

Standing over six-foot tall, the canvas depicts Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of Klimt’s most important patrons, August and Szerena Lederer. Painted between 1914 and 1916, it represents the artist’s late, ornamental style.

Elisabeth is swaddled in a billowing, diaphanous dress, nestled within a textured and ornamental pyramid, an implied Imperial dragon robe. The upper half of her torso is ensconced in an arc of stylised Chinese figures. The effect reminds me of a halo in an icon (religious images painted on wooden panels).

The setting is fantastical, abstracted, unreal, ornamental – above all, rich. Despite the jewel-like setting, Elisabeth’s face is painted with a striking, psychological realism. Her expression is detached, enigmatic, perhaps isolated. Her hands seem fretful.

It is hard not to project meaning with the benefit of hindsight, but she seems to gaze out from a world of immense Viennese wealth, a world unknowingly on the brink of annihilation.

The Lederers were a prominent Jewish family. After the 1938 Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany), they faced persecution. The family scattered. But Elisabeth remained, divorced and isolated, in Vienna.

Classified as a Volljüdin (“full Jew”) under the Nazi regime’s antisemitic rule, she faced a likely death. In desperation, she circulated a rumour that she was the illegitimate child of Klimt, the Austrian and Aryan painter of her earlier portrait.

To aid this endeavour, her mother Szerena, who had fled to Budapest, swore an affidavit that Elisabeth’s biological father was not her Jewish husband, August, but Klimt, a notorious philanderer. The claim was not without plausibility. Klimt had a long personal relationship with the Lederer household. Elisabeth’s portrait is itself a document of this interest and closeness.

The Nazis, eager to reclaim Klimt’s genius for the Reich, accepted the fabrication. If Elisabeth was not a “full Jew” but instead a Mischling (half-Jewish), then the painting itself could be reclassified as an Aryan work of art. With Elisabeth’s desperate sleight of hand, both she and the painting were saved.

Aided by her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, Elisabeth was legally reclassified as illegitimate and “half-Aryan”. This lie successfully shielded her from the death camps, uniting art history, gossip and survival in a single legal document.

This deception also ensured the painting’s physical survival. The Lederer Klimts fell into two camps. The Jewish portraits were degenerate art, and were set aside to be sold. But the rest were considered important heritage. While the Nazis moved the bulk of the looted Lederer collection to the castle Schloss Immendorf for safekeeping, Elisabeth’s portrait remained in Vienna due to its newly contested “Aryan” status, in limbo. In May 1945, SS troops set fire to the Schloss, incinerating over a dozen Klimt masterpieces, including a painting of Elisabeth’s grandmother. But in Vienna, the painting of Elisabeth, and another of her mother, Szerena, survived. This brutal and arbitrary destruction is what makes Elisabeth’s painting such a statistical anomaly.

As one of only two full-length Klimt portraits remaining in private hands, its scarcity is near absolute. For collectors, this auction was an inelastic opportunity. On Tuesday November 18, if you wanted to own a major Klimt portrait, it was this one, or none.

The work’s post-war provenance further amplifies its value. The painting was restituted to Elisabeth’s brother Erich in 1948. In 1985, it was purchased by the cosmetics billionaire Leonard A. Lauder.

Unlike many investment-grade masterpieces that are sequestered in free ports, unseen and treated as financial assets, Lauder lived intimately with the work for 40 years, reportedly eating lunch beside it daily.

He frequently loaned it anonymously to major institutions, ensuring its visibility to art history and scholarship, but without testing its value on the market for four decades. Lauder’s loving stewardship added a premium, presenting the work not just as a commodity, but as a cherished, well-documented piece of cultural heritage.

Ultimately, the US$236.4 million price tag reflects a value proposition that transcends simple supply and demand. The anonymous buyer has acquired an object of extreme aesthetic power, but also a tangible relic of resilience. It is a painting saved by a daughter’s lie, a mother’s perjury, the vanity and cupidity of an odious regime, emerging intact from the wreckage of the second world war.

In a market characterised by hype and speculation, this sale rewards deep historical density and incredible technical prowess. Elisabeth’s portrait, which is both monumental and deeply personal, opens a window to the tragic heart of the 20th century.

This legacy should not be financialised, but it is disturbing to speculate to what extent its dark past is reflected in the hammer price. Let’s hope the new owner treats the work as lovingly as her previous custodian. The painting deserves to be shared with the world.

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Benedict Carpenter van Barthold 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. How a desperate lie saved a Gustav Klimt portrait from the Nazis – and helped shape its record sale price – https://theconversation.com/how-a-desperate-lie-saved-a-gustav-klimt-portrait-from-the-nazis-and-helped-shape-its-record-sale-price-270395

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Valentina Fantasia, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Lund University

It’s a common scene on public transport. A parent holds a mobile phone showing noisy cartoons to their young child. The pair is looking at the screen together, laughing. Yet parent and child rarely exchange a gaze or look out across the landscape.

While many parents can relate to such moments, this is just an example of how technology (mainly digital screens but also vocal assistants, domestic robots and so on) have become part of our daily routines, changing the way we interact and engage with the world around and – most importantly – with each other.

But how does all this change how young children develop?

Human development is essentially a social practice. From infancy, we participate in the world around us and learn from experience, especially from unfamiliar situations and cultural encounters, with the help of more knowledgeable partners.

As adults interact with kids, they share views and create new knowledge. We make sense of the world around us, in its variety, complexity and beauty. Children learn from it, and adults learn how to see the world from the child’s eyes. How can we possibly encounter the world or make sense of it when our attention is captured by a screen?

Five decades of research in developmental disciplines have shown just how much human development is dependent on the fine-grained details of daily social communication. For infants and young children, communicating is not an abstract or conceptual thing: it’s based on the small, routine moments shared with others, from stopping to observe a slow-paced slug on the way to school to reading a book together at the breakfast table. This is how we become humans.

What makes those early activities between children and adults special is the fact that they are co-constructed moment by moment through talk, gaze, gestures (such as pointing to something) and movements.

As our research has extensively shown, in the first months and years of life, infants experience and learn the patterns of interaction with others, in which the timings of gaze, movements, vocalisations and language are crucial.

This includes how long you look at each other, or learn to make pauses and take turns in a conversation or activity. It’s also about making eye contact before pointing to an interesting object in the room. These patterns teach us how to relate to others and participate in joint activities, and there is currently no substitute for such learning.

Becoming post-digital humans

Smart devices and streaming tools have made digital media become an integral part of family life. Two-thirds of children aged two to five use screens for more than an hour a day, and the average starting age of screen use is getting dramatically lower.

During the past two decades, researchers have showed how digital technologies are changing the way children cope with everyday tasks and activities, from playing and paying attention to remembering things and sleeping.

Exposure to digital devices on a daily basis has been linked to difficulties with completing homework, finishing tasks and staying calm when issues arise in the family. Sleep quality also seems negatively affected by screens, particularly if it’s right before bedtime.

Even having a TV on in the background can negatively influence very young children’s play time, disturbing the quality of their focused attention and shortening their play activity.

But although neuroscience is telling us that recurrent exposure to smart technologies is already rewiring humans’ brains, not all of it is negative. High-quality media content, offered for instance by cartoons or educational apps, may help children cope better with their emotions and improve language skills.

So are we evolving into techno-hybrid super-intelligent creatures? As we let kids roam free on Sesame Street on our smartphones, are they becoming smarter?

Maybe it is not a completely negative thing after all, as writers and academics such as Jeannette Winterson and Katherine N. Hayles suggest. Becoming post-human, in their view, is the next step in humans natural evolution towards adapting and transforming into something different – not better, not worse.

Ultimately, while there is potential for technology to make children smarter in some domains, we also know it can disrupt their attention, play and sleep. What we don’t know is exactly how it impacts how children and parents relate to each other. Our group, SITE, at the Robotic lab at Lund University, is currently investigating how children understand technology and how digital practices shape interactions in early school and family.

No magic recipe

A century ago, Maria Montessori suggested that attention is the finest gift an adult can give to a child. Attention, in her view, was the capacity to attend to a child’s way of discovering the world, and then share it together.

When adults and children’s attention is oriented towards something else, detached from its context, like watching a video on the phone while sitting in a park, there might be missing opportunity to discover and learn together through moments of mutual attention.

It is there that children test their agency and influence, and learn to engage and disengage with others. As technology is advancing faster than ever, we need to gauge how much technology is changing this vital contact.

Western parents are increasingly concerned over their kids’ screen time and for most, negotiating this time is a real struggle. But instead of blaming family practices, we should support parents in understanding that no magic recipe exists. The key is to find out which shared moments are best out-sourced to tech devices and which should be preserved as tech-free.

And this is our suggestion: any moment of the day spent together without screens is precious, even the ones which seem irrelevant. Reading a book at bedtime, telling invented stories while driving the car, picking up chestnuts on the street on the way home or even being bored together are all crucial.

Keep those moments and choose which ones may just be worth screens, for example when the adult’s energy is simply too low to offer anything better. No size fits everyone – just find what works for your own family.

In a few years, we might see that our slow-pace process of learning with and through others has profoundly changed. And while technology itself should not be seen as all bad or good, a deeper understanding of how children are watching, playing and doing things with digital tools is necessary.

Valentina Fantasia receives funding from The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS). She is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Lund University, Sweden.

Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi is a professor at the University of Warsaw. Her research was funded by the Polish-German collaborative research Beethoven on “Early Semantic Development” and EU H2020 Twinning project “Towards Human-centered Technology Development.”

– ref. How technology is reshaping children’s development – the good, the bad and the unknown – https://theconversation.com/how-technology-is-reshaping-childrens-development-the-good-the-bad-and-the-unknown-268148