Eyewitness  Round the horn

Switzerland Participants gather for a final blowout at the 22nd International Alphorn
Festival, held at Tracouet near the resort of Haute-Nendaz in the Swiss Alps.
PHOTOGRAPH:
The traditional wooden instrument measures around 3.4 metres long and was
ROBIN MILLARD/AFP/ GETTY reputedly used by mountain dwellers for long-distance communication.

Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and
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Founded in Manchester, America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power
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 A week in the life of the world Inside
28 July 2023

Reign in Spain still

unclear, lament for
Khartoum, fire hazard
For weeks in the buildup to Spain’s snap election, it 4 -14 GLOBAL REPORT
had seemed a foregone conclusion that a coalition of Headlines from the last
rightwing parties would win, potentially opening a door seven days
to power for the far-right Vox party. Instead, the outcome 10 Spain Has support for the
saw a hung parliament dominated by the conservative far-right Vox popped?
People’s party, and the socialist party of the current leader,
Pedro Sánchez. 15-33 SPOTLIGHT
With the outcome now unclear, Madrid correspondent In-depth reporting
Sam Jones sets the scene for weeks of likely coalition and analysis
negotiations, while Europe community affairs 15 India Outrage over gang
correspondent Ashifa Kassam asks why Vox, having rapes in Manipur
seemingly reached the brink of government, instead saw 18 Ukraine A grain offensive
its vote collapse. And there’s a reminder from Europe 20 UK Labour’s byelection
correspondent Jon Henley of the wider far-right political swings and roundabouts
threat that still hangs over the continent. 22  Eyewitness Greek island
The big story Page 10  tourist evacuations
24 Canada Wildfires take toll
Extreme weather continued to cause havoc around the on volunteer crews
world this week, with a particular focus on wildfires. As 29 New Zealand Fungi fun
thousands of tourists were evacuated from Greek islands 30 Science How we got
on one side of the world, we also hear from exhausted hooked on weather apps
volunteer firefighters who have been battling blazes for 33 Mexico Death of a
weeks in Canada. vigilante rebel
Spotlight Page 22 
34-44 F E AT U R E S
You’ll find several outstanding longer reads in this week’s Long reads, interviews
edition, not least Guardian opinion writer Nesrine Malik’s and essays
heartfelt lament for Khartoum, the city of her birth, as civil 34 The tragedy of Khartoum
war continues to rage in Sudan. By Nesrine Malik
Then, in a change of pace, Tom Lamont charts the rapid 40 Has the British fish supper
demise of the classic British fish and chip shop, a national had its chips?
institution under siege from soaring food and energy costs. By Tom Lamont
Features From page 34
45-50 OPINION
Last but not least, in the Culture 45 Rana Mitter
section the former Observer China’s economic woes
writer Ed Vulliamy visits Kyiv 47 Cath Bishop
to meet some of the musicians Sporting mega-events
spearheading a fierce cultural make no financial sense
resistance against Russia’s 48 John Harris
military assault on Ukraine. Britain’s lamentable
Culture Page 51 climate politics

51-59 C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre,
art, architecture & more
Join the community On the cover Madrid-based illustrator Federico 51 Music
Twitter: @guardianweekly Yankelevich’s depiction of a fascist eagle Ukraine’s sonic resistance
facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian casting a shadow over Spain’s flag sums up the 55 Exhibition
anxieties of many in the country: “The values Disney and Walt-washing
of the old Catholic national morality hovering 57 Books
threateningly over Spanish democracy,” as he Trekking in the Caucasus
put it. After last weekend’s election, it looks like
that threat may have passed – for now, at least. 60-61 LIFESTYLE
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Illustration: Federico Yankelevich 60 Tim Dowling
MATT BLEASE A saw point
61 Recipe
4

Global
2 CANADA 4 UKRAINE

Russians bombard grain

report stores along the Danube

Russian drones launched an attack
on Ukraine’s Danube ports of
Reni and Izmail, destroying grain
warehouses and other facilities, as
Headlines from Moscow appeared to escalate its
the last seven days attempts to strangle Kyiv’s crucial
agricultural exports.
The attacks, using drones
1 C L I M AT E E M E RG E N C Y Nova Scotia hit by heaviest
supplied by Iran, follow Russia’s
downpours in four decades withdrawal from the Black Sea
Clear link between deadly
The heaviest rains in more than 40 deal that allowed Ukraine to
heat and burning fossil fuel years badly damaged Halifax, export its grain and threats by
Copyright © 2023 The human-caused climate crisis a city in Canada’s Atlantic region. both Moscow and Kyiv to target
GNM Ltd. All rights is undeniably to blame for deadly The storm dumped more than civilian carriers visiting ports.
reserved heatwaves that have struck 25cm on some parts in 24 hours, Ukrainian officials said
Europe and the US, analysis by the same amount that usually falls 15 Shahed-136 drones were
Published weekly by scientists has shown. in three months. launched overnight on Monday
Guardian News & Both would have been virtually Authorities declared a state and six people had been wounded.
Media Ltd, impossible without the global of emergency in Halifax, Nova The governor of Ukraine’s Odesa
Kings Place, heating driven by burning fossil Scotia’s largest city, and four region, Oleh Kiper, told Ukrainian
90 York Way,
fuels. Another searing heatwave, other regions. The regional television: “Russia is trying to fully
London, N1 9GU, UK
in China, was made 50 times municipality in Halifax reported block the export of our grain and
Printed in the UK, more likely by the climate crisis. “significant damage to roads and make the world starve.”
Poland, the US, The results make it clear that infrastructure”. The drone attacks followed
Australia and human-caused global heating is “We have a scary, significant a rise in Russian strikes on
New Zealand destroying lives, making the need situation here,” provincial premier infrastructure associated with
to cut emissions more urgent. Tim Houston said. Ukrainian grain exports. There
ISSN 0958-9996 Such heatwaves were no longer Two children were missing have been daily attacks since
rare, the scientists said, and would after their car was submerged. Moscow withdrew from the Black
To advertise contact worsen as emissions kept rising. In another incident, a man and a Sea deal, including on the key port
advertising.
A report by leading climate youth were missing after their car facilities in Odesa, which had been
enquiries@
scientists in March, endorsed ran into deep waters. central to the agreement.
theguardian.com
by governments, said: “There Spotlight Page 24  Spotlight Page 18 
To subscribe, visit is a rapidly closing window of
theguardian.com/ opportunity to secure a livable and
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3 U N I T E D S TAT E S 5 U N I T E D S TAT E S
Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial
Manage your College London, who was part
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Judge sets start date for Biden announces industry
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subscribe. “These extremes kill people, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago case collaboration on AI safety
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Toll Free: value people, it’s pretty obvious them will begin on 20 May of next safeguards, Joe Biden announced.
+1-844-632-2010 what we need to do.” year, a federal judge ruled. Among the guidelines brokered
Spotlight Page 22  Trump’s lawyers had argued are watermarks that make it
Australia and for a delay until after the 2024 easier to identify AI content
New Zealand election, in which Trump is again and third-party testing to check
apac.help running for president. for dangerous flaws. Biden said
@theguardian.com Federal judge Aileen Cannon the commitment would help
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gwsubs@ evidence that can be used in this threatening to do real damage
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The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

UK headlines p9

6 GERMANY

CDU leader gives approval

to far-right cooperation
The leader of the centre-right
Christian Democratic Union
has said his party is willing to
cooperate with the far-right
Alternative für Deutschland at
a local political level, triggering
cries of protest from his party.
In an interview with state
broadcaster ZDF, Friedrich Merz
categorically ruled out a coalition
with the AfD at national level, but
said such a taboo should not apply
to local politics. “We are obliged
to accept democratic votes,” Merz
said. “And if the head of a district
authority or a mayor is voted in
who belongs to the AfD, then of
course you find ways to continue
to work in that town.”
The big story Page 13 
7 BRAZIL
9 S PA I N
Rightwing fails to win 1
enough seats to govern
The opposition conservative party
won the most seats in national
elections, but looked unlikely
to secure a coalition after a vote 4
2
that had raised fears of the far
right entering government for
the first time since the return to
democracy after General Franco’s
death almost five decades ago.
Although polls had consistently
predicted that the opposition
3 conservative People’s party
would cruise past the Spanish
Socialist Workers party to secure
an emphatic win, early results
established that the race was
much tighter and there is likely
to be weeks of negotiating as the
rival camps explore their options.
The big story Page 10 

10 U S / I T A LY

Constitution released in
an Indigenous language
The Brazilian constitution has
gained its first official translation
into an Indigenous language, in
what has been hailed as a historic
moment. The translation into
Nheengatu was unveiled in São
Gabriel da Cachoeira, a town deep
in the Amazon, in a ceremony
attended by Brazilian authorities
and Indigenous leaders.
“Today is a milestone in our
country’s constitutional history,”
said Rosa Weber, the chief justice
of the supreme court.
Brazil’s Indigenous movement
played an active role in enshrining
recognition and protection of their
culture in the 1988 constitution.
8 FA L K L A N D I S L A N D S
EU leaders back Argentine
name of Islas Malvinas
Forty-one years after the
Falklands war, the UK has suffered
a defeat as the EU appeared to
endorse the Argentinian name for
the archipelago.
Brussels supported an
Argentina-backed declaration
referring to Islas Malvinas at
a summit of EU leaders with
Latin America and the Caribbean
leaders, which Buenos Aires called
a “diplomatic triumph”.
British diplomats requested
that the European Council
president, Charles Michel,
“clarify” the bloc’s position.
An EU official told the Financial
Times: “If [the UK was] in the EU
perhaps they would have pushed
back against it.”
Letter from Columbus is
back with officials in Rome
The US returned a rare
15th-century original edition of
a letter written by Christopher
Columbus to Italy.
The letter, valued at more than
$1.3m, was revealed to have been
stolen between 1985 and 1988,
probably from the Biblioteca
Nazionale Marciana, the historic
public library in Venice.
It is one of 30 surviving first
editions of Columbus’s letter
announcing his “discovery” of
the Americas.
Federal investigators recovered
the letter in 2020. It was in the
possession of a private collector
from Texas, who said he had
obtained it in 2003 from a rare
book dealer. The collector
voluntarily relinquished the letter.
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

11 ISRAEL
Thousands protest against
Netanyahu’s judicial move
The country was facing a full-
blown constitutional crisis after
its far-right, ultra-religious
government passed a key part of
the coalition’s judicial overhaul,
seven months after introducing
the legislation, in the face of
widespread, sustained opposition.
The bill abolishing the
“reasonableness” clause that
allows the unelected supreme
court to overrule government
decisions was passed into law by
a final vote of 64-0 in parliament
on Monday. Opposition lawmakers
abandoned the Knesset plenum
in protest. A political watchdog
group immediately moved to file
a supreme court appeal on the
grounds that the new law was
a “de-facto elimination of the
judicial branch”.
It was feared upwards of 10,000
military reservists would stop
reporting for duty, and wide-scale
industrial action was expected in
response to the vote.
In a televised address on
Monday night, Benjamin
Netanyahu – who had undergone
an emergency heart procedure
the previous day – described the
bill as “a necessary democratic
act” that would “return a measure
of balance between the branches
of government.”
The prime minister called for
national unity. As he spoke, Israeli
TV showed a split screen with
a police water cannon spraying
crowds of protesters; about
20,000 had gathered near the
parliament building.
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
13 IRAQ
Swedish ambassador is
expelled from Baghdad
In protest against a planned
burning of the Qur’an in
Stockholm, which had prompted
hundreds of demonstrators to
storm and set alight the Swedish
embassy in Baghdad, Iraq expelled
the Swedish ambassador.
A statement said Baghdad had
also recalled its chargé d’affaires
from Sweden.
Anti-Islam protesters had
applied for and received
permission from Swedish police to 19
burn the Qur’an outside the Iraqi
embassy on 20 July. Protesters
partly destroyed a book they said
was the Qur’an, but dispersed
without burning it.
17
14 SUDAN
18
Volunteer medics whipped
15
in Khartoum ambush
Increased violence against
health workers in Khartoum is
endangering the few hospitals still
open in the Sudanese capital, the
12 ALGERIA
medical charity Médecins Sans
Frontières said after its employees
Wildfires kill 34 as 8,000
had been beaten and whipped
firefighters tackle blazes by armed men.
Thirty-four people including The MSF team was attacked
10 soldiers were killed by wildfires on 20 July, about 700 metres
in the mountainous Béjaïa and from the Turkish hospital, one of
16 Bouïra regions of Algeria. only two operating in southern
About 8,000 firefighters Khartoum after others were forced
were trying to bring the flames to close during almost 100 days
under control, authorities said of fighting between the Sudanese
on Monday, adding that about army and the paramilitary Rapid
1,500 people had been evacuated. Support Forces.
Algeria’s interior ministry said MSF said it may not be able to
operations were under way to put maintain its presence in the city.
out fires in six provinces and asked Tragedy of Khartoum Page 34 
for people to avoid areas affected
by the fires. “Civil protection
services remain mobilised
until the fires are completely
extinguished,” the ministry said.
Eyewitness Page 22 

Global report
15 K E N YA
Critics held as police fire on
cost of living protesters
Teargas and live ammunition were
used against demonstrators as
pockets of violence broke out in
Kenya during protests against tax
increases and rising living costs.
There were clashes in the
informal settlements of Kibera
and Mathare in Nairobi and in the
western city of Kisumu. Protesters
threw stones at police, who
had mounted a heavy presence
after the deaths of at least six
demonstrators and more than 300
arrests around the country.
Babu Owino, MP for Nairobi’s
Embakasi East constituency, was
one of several opposition figures
arrested in connection with the
protests. Among the others was
Maina Njenga, the former leader
of the proscribed organisation
Mungiki, who has associated
himself with the opposition.
16 SOUTH AFRICA
Putin to miss Brics summit
in row over possible arrest
Vladimir Putin will not attend
a Brics summit in South Africa
amid speculation that he could be
detained under an international
criminal court warrant for his
arrest for war crimes in Ukraine.
South Africa’s presidential
office announced that the Russian
president would not attend the
summit – held by Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa
– after holding a “number of
consultations” with the Kremlin.
South Africa is an ICC signatory
and would be expected to aid
in Putin’s arrest, something
President Cyril Ramaphosa said
would risk a war with Russia.
The big story p10 
7
17 CAMBODIA 19 CHINA D E AT H S
Hun Sen issues threat after Facekini tops the list of
protesters destroy ballots popular sun-defence attire
The country’s authoritarian leader In scorching Beijing, “facekinis”
warned voters who destroyed are the hottest new fashion as
their ballots to turn themselves surging temperatures shatter Tony Bennett
in or face legal consequences, as records. With the air temperature US singer who
he claimed victory after running rising above 35C and the ground became the
virtually uncontested in a one- surface temperature soaring torchbearer
sided election. as high as 80C in some parts of for the Great
Hun Sen, 70, who has governed China, residents and visitors have American
for almost four decades, said in taken to carrying portable fans Songbook during
a Telegram post that unofficial and covering themselves up to a seven-decade
results showed his party had won avoid getting burnt. career. He died on
120 seats and a royalist party had Facekinis – full-face masks 21 July, aged 96.
won five on an 84% turnout. with holes for the wearer’s
There had been little doubt over eyes and nostrils – as well Ann Clwyd
the outcome of last Sunday’s vote, as separate sleeves to cover Welsh Labour MP
given that the only opposition arms, wide-brimmed hats and and campaigner
party big enough to pose a lightweight jackets made of for the mining
threat, the Candlelight party, was UV-resistant fabric, are popular. industry and
barred from running after it was Many women in east Asia Kurdish people.
accused of not submitting the favour fair skin, and sun- She died on 21
correct paperwork. A crackdown protection products are also July, aged 86.
on opposition voices ahead of popular in neighbouring countries
the vote, which also included such as South Korea. George Alagiah
legal challenges to prevent voter Sri Lankan-born
boycotts, left spoiled ballots as BBC newsreader
one of the only outlets for people and foreign
to protest against the regime. correspondent. He
Hun Sen said the result died on 24 July,
demonstrated that attempts by aged 67.
the “extremist” opposition to
undermine the vote had failed. He Gordon Briscoe
is expected to hand over power to The first
his son and successor, Hun Manet. Aboriginal
Australian to
stand for federal
parliament. He
18 M A L AY S I A 20 C L I M AT E C R I S I S died on 30 June,
aged 85.
The 1975 cancel gigs after Discord at G20 meeting over
same-sex kiss on stage pathways to cut emissions Trevor Francis
The British band the 1975 The G20 bloc of wealthy Britain’s first
cancelled concerts in Indonesia economies meeting in India failed £1m footballer, in
and Taiwan after their gig in to reach a consensus on phasing 1979. He died on
Malaysia was cut short. down fossil fuels. 24 July, aged 69.
The lead singer, Matty Healy, Scientists and campaigners
criticised anti-LGBT laws on are exasperated by international João Donato
stage in Kuala Lumpur and kissed bodies’ foot-dragging on action Brazilian
bass player Ross MacDonald. even as extreme weather in the composer and
Homosexuality in Malaysia is northern hemisphere underlined pianist who
punishable by 20 years in prison. the climate emergency. pioneered bossa
The following day, organisers The G20 countries account for nova. He died on
of Malaysia’s Good Vibes festival more than three-quarters of global 17 July, aged 88.
announced that its remaining emissions and gross domestic
lineup had been cancelled. product. Tripling of renewable Lord Creator
Carmen Rose, a Malaysian drag energy capacities by 2030 was Trinidadian singer
queen, told the BBC that Healy’s among the disagreements at and songwriter.
actions were “performative” a meeting in Goa. He died on 30
and “unruly”. Opinion Page 22  June, aged 87.
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
8 Global report
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
MARINE LIFE
Baby seahorses released into
Sydney Harbour ‘hotels’
Hundreds of juvenile seahorses have
been moved into “hotels” in Sydney
Harbour in what local scientists say
is the world’s biggest ever release of
the marine creature into the wild.
About 380 White’s seahorses were
released last week after being bred
and reared by the Sydney Institute of
Marine Science.
The fish were released into
swimming nets and artificial
habitats dubbed “seahorse hotels”
– metal structures with algae and
sponges growing over them.
Scientist Mitchell Brennan, who
hand-reared the seahorse fry, said:
“Hopefully we see them out there
for years to come, reproducing and
adding to populations.”
C L I M AT E C R I SI S
Vegan diet ‘massively cuts
environmental damage’
Eating a vegan diet massively
reduces the damage to the
environment caused by food
production, a study has concluded.
The research showed that
vegan diets resulted in 75% less
climate-heating emissions, water
pollution and land use than diets in
which more than 100g of meat a day
was eaten. Vegan diets also cut the
destruction of wildlife by 66% and
water use by 54%, the study found.
Researchers analysed the diets
of 55,000 people in the UK and
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
used data from 38,000 farms in 119
countries to account for differences
in the impact of particular foods.
Prof Peter Scarborough at Oxford
University, who led the research,
published in the journal Nature
Food, said: “Our dietary choices
have a big impact on the planet.”
S PA C E
Two-faced white dwarf lone
star baffles astronomers
Astronomers have discovered
a two-faced star and are baffled by
its bizarre appearance.
The white dwarf appears to have
one side composed almost entirely
of hydrogen and the other side
made up of helium. It is the first
time astronomers have discovered
a lone star that appears to have
spontaneously developed two
contrasting faces.
“The surface of the white dwarf
completely changes from one side to
the other,” said Dr Ilaria Caiazzo, an
astrophysicist at Caltech who led the
work. The object, which is more than
1,000 light years away in the Cygnus
constellation, has been nicknamed
Janus, after the two-faced Roman
god of transition. The findings are
published in the journal Nature.
H E A LT H
‘Forever chemicals’ found in
blood of pregnant women
Researchers have found evidence
that several chemicals used in plastic
production and other industrial
applications are commonly present
in the blood of pregnant women,
creating increased health risks for
mothers and their babies.
“We are exposed to hundreds of
chemicals and this ... contributes
to better understanding the impact
they are having on our health,”
said Tracey Woodruff, a professor
and the director of the University
of California San Francisco
programme on reproductive health
and the environment.
The US government-funded study
was published in the Environmental
Health Perspectives journal.
United Kingdom
POLITICS
Byelection losses increase
chance of an early election
Rishi Sunak is being urged by
senior Conservatives to call
an election in the first half of
next year, with the plan said to
be “gaining traction” among
 One of the campaign strategists who believe
380 endangered it may be the Tories’ best chance
White’s seahorses to stem losses.
that have been In the aftermath of last week’s
released after byelections, which resulted in
being reared in a 21-point average swing against
captivity at the the Tories, some party insiders
Sydney Institute suggested May 2024 could be
of Marine Science an “economic sweet spot” –
SIMS providing the best window for
“damage limitation”.
Sunak came under pressure
after the defeats in North
Yorkshire and Somerset, despite
the Tories pulling off a narrow win
in Boris Johnson’s former seat in
west London. The results caused
some ministers to privately push
the government to soften its
net-zero plans and take a stronger
stance on “wedge” issues that
could create more of a dividing
line from Keir Starmer’s party.
The 19,000 and 20,000
majorities that were overturned by
Labour and the Liberal Democrats
have also renewed jitters among
Tory MPs about the safety of
their own seats.
“Rishi will take a stronger view
once we get to next January,”
said one senior Tory source. “But
the case for an early election is
gaining traction.”
Tory strategists point to
inflation falling faster than
expected – to 7.9% from 8.7% – and
hopes that Sunak’s aim to halve
inflation will be reached, if not by
500
the end of the year, then in early
2024. “There’s an economic sweet
spot,” said one insider.
The number Spotlight Page 20 
of orca attacks
on boats in
the waters
off south-
west Europe
recorded since
2020. The first
such incident in
northern waters
was reported in
June this year

Eyewitness
 Flings of wonder
Dancers compete during the
Inveraray Highland Games
in Scotland. The games are
held annually in the grounds
of Inveraray Castle, in Argyll
and Bute, and celebrate
Scottish culture and heritage
with field and track events,
piping, dancing competitions
and “heavy events” including
the world championships
for tossing the caber – a large
wooden pole that is 6 metres
long and more than 60kg
in weight.
JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY
H E A LT H
Concern over exodus of
experienced NHS doctors
The NHS is losing senior doctors
to countries including Ireland,
Australia and the United Arab
Emirates because they can double
their salary and enjoy better
working conditions.
Professional bodies are
concerned about a growing
exodus of experienced doctors,
the Guardian has been told,
while increasing numbers
of middle-aged consultants
opting for a new life abroad is
exacerbating the workforce crisis
within the NHS.
The revelation came after NHS
consultants in England staged two
days of strike action last week in
a row over pay. They will strike
again for two days in August.
Global medical recruiters have
for years been able to tempt junior
doctors away from the NHS but
Simon Walsh, a deputy chair of
the British Medical Association
consultants’ committee, said
salaries and superior working
conditions were tempting older,
and more experienced, doctors.
ENVIRONMENT
Twelve companies cause
70% of branded pollution
Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and
PepsiCo have been named as the
biggest packaging polluters in the
UK, according to an annual audit.
The campaign group Surfers
Against Sewage examined more
than 30,700 items collected
alongside coastlines, canal paths,
bridleways and city streets over a
12-month period up to 5 June 2023.
The audit found 12 companies
were responsible for more than
two-thirds (70%) of branded
pollution. Coca-Cola was found to
be the UK’s biggest polluter for the
fourth year running.
Other top polluters include
Tesco, Haribo, Nestlé, Heineken,
Mars, Carlsberg and Red Bull.
UK Spotlight p20
9
BANKING
NatWest boss apologises to
Farage over account closure
The head of NatWest apologised
to Nigel Farage for what she called
“deeply inappropriate comments”
about the former Ukip leader in
an internal report that led to the
closure of his accounts at the
group’s private bank, Coutts.
Dame Alison Rose issued a
public statement and wrote a
letter to Farage apologising for the
way the NatWest subsidiary had
handled its decision to cut ties
with the Brexit campaigner.
4
Farage welcomed the apology
from Rose but claimed she had
been forced into it by the Treasury.
An internal report had The number
described Farage as a of rare phone
“disingenuous grifter” who boxes on London
promotes “xenophobic, Underground
chauvinistic and racist views”. stations that
Rose said the comments, have been given
prepared for Coutts’ wealth Grade II-listed
reputation risk committee “do not protected
reflect the view of the bank,” but status by the
she stopped short of reinstating government
Farage as a Coutts client, instead for their
reiterating an offer to open a basic architectural
account for him at NatWest. and historic
interest
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
10 The big story

Spanish election

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

 Against the tide Bloc party
Spain pushes back, page 13  The rise of Europe’s right, page 14 

S PA I N

Polls had predicted an election win

for the conservative People’s party,
in league with far-right Vox. But a
hung parliament has left all to play
for and delivered a significant blow
to Europe’s rightwing populists

By Sam Jones MADRID and Lisa O’Carroll BRUSSELS

he Spanish Social- governments while Sánchez remains

▲ Far-right ist leader, Pedro as acting prime minister.
Vox leader Sánchez, ruled Between them, the PP and Vox won
Santiago out a return to 169 seats – seven short of the threshold
Abascal the polls follow- needed for an absolute majority in con-
VINCENT WEST/
REUTERS ing last Sunday’s gress – while the PSOE and its allies in
inconclusive snap the new, far-left Sumar coalition won
general election, 153 seats between them. Although
insisting a new government can be the right bloc has more seats, the left
formed after his ruling coalition was bloc has a greater chance of secur-
narrowly beaten by the opposition ing the support of smaller regional
conservative People’s party (PP). parties, many of which will be put off
Numerous opinion polls had a potential PP government because
suggested the PP and its potential of the party’s recent coalition deals
allies in the far-right Vox party would with Vox following May’s regional and
comfortably win enough votes to top- municipal elections.
ple the government of Sánchez’s Span- PSOE sources said the acting prime
ish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) minister had told his party there was
and its partners in the far-left Unidas no need for another election because
Podemos alliance. he was “sure that our democracy can
The conservatives finished first find a formula for government”.
with 136 seats in Spain’s 350-seat However, Sánchez – who is
congress but found themselves up routinely accused by his critics of
against a resurgent PSOE, which fin- being far too reliant on the votes of
ished second with 122 seats. The Vox Catalan and Basque separatists – looks
party, heavily touted as a kingmaker, likely to need the backing of Junts, a
suffered a crushing night with its seat hardline Catalan pro-independence
count dropping from 52 to 33. party. Junts is the party of the former
 The leader The hung parliament meant the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont,
of the People’s left and right blocs were this week who fled Spain to avoid arrest after 
party, Alberto trying to put together coalition his unilateral attempts to secure
Núñez Feijóo
OSCAR DEL POZO/
AFP/GETTY Official results
PSOE Sumar Vox PP
122 31 50% 33 136

ERC 7; JxCAT - JUNTS 7; EH Bildu 6; EAJ-PNV 5; BNG 1; CCa 1; UPN 1

Source: Spanish government. With 100% of votes counted. Seats in the Congreso (lower house)

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

12 The big story
Spanish election
▲ A giant poster of Alberto Núñez
Feijóo is taken down EMILIO MORENATTI/AP
Catalan independence failed six years
ago – and who is no fan of Sánchez.
Speaking on Monday, the PP’s
leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, admitted
his party hadn’t “lived up to our expec-
tations” but said he had spoken to Vox
and three regional parties – the Navar-
rese People’s Union (UPN), the Canar-
ian Coalition (CCa) and the Basque
Nationalist party (EAJ-PNV) – with a
view to forming “a stable government”.
Other senior PP members said the
party had a clear mandate to rule.
The party’s deputy organisational
secretary, Miguel Tellado, told the
state broadcaster TVE that “dialogue,
dialogue and dialogue is the challenge
that lies ahead for us”, adding: “No one
wants a political impasse that could
lead to another election.”
Cuca Gamarra, the PP’s general
secretary, said her party had won
the elections in terms of seats and
share of the vote and called on the
socialists not to try to cut deals with
Catalan separatists.
“You can’t try to pull off an
investiture vote at any cost and using
anyone’s vote because you’ll end up
in the hands of Puigdemont, a fugitive
from justice, and in the hands of parties
that only want to push for independ-
ence,” she told Telecinco on Monday.
Gamarra said there were only
two  possible options for the next
government: “Either the party that
won the elections governs or we end
up in a situation with an impasse and
another Frankenstein [government].”
‘One day you form a
Spanish government,
the next day Spain
orders your arrest’
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
Junts has already signalled that
its help in returning the socialists
to power would have a price. It said
it would like to see an amnesty for
exiled Catalan politicians and a proper
referendum on self-determination.
Sánchez, however, has repeatedly said
there will be no independence vote.
“We won’t make Pedro Sánchez PM
in exchange for nothing,” its leader,
Míriam Nogueras, warned last Sunday
night. Puigdemont, meanwhile, said
his party “owes nothing to anyone but
our voters”, adding that it had never
supported Sánchez’s budgets, reforms
or the “farce” of his dialogue aimed at
finding a solution to the question of
Catalan independence.
Puigdemont’s suddenly acquired
say over who governs Spain will come
as a welcome boost to the bitterly
divided and stalled regional inde-
pendence movement. The two main
pro-independence parties – Junts and
the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) –
suffered dismal results on Sunday.
The Catalan branch of the socialist
party came first, followed by Sumar.
The ERC came third, losing six seats,
followed by Junts, which lost one seat.
The ERC, which belongs to the more
moderate, pragmatic wing of the inde-
pendence movement, has said it is pre-
pared to support a new, socialist-led
government to provide an alternative
to a PP-Vox coalition.
Negotiations are likely to be further
complicated by a request from pros-
ecutors for a Spanish supreme court
judge to issue an arrest warrant for
Puigdemont over his role in the unsuc-
cessful push for independence.
Prosecutors have asked for a Euro-
pean arrest warrant to be issued in light
of a decision three weeks ago by the
general court of the European Union
that dismissed Puigdemont’s appeal to
retain immunity from prosecution as a
member of the European parliament.
The former regional president’s
lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, accused the
Spanish judicial authorities of playing
politics. “The petition has come in the
middle of the debate about the election
results,” said Boye. “They are trying to
take part in the political debate.”
Puigdemont expressed similar sen-
timents in a tweet on Monday. “One
day you are decisive in order to form
a Spanish government, the next day
Spain orders your arrest,” he wrote.
SAM JONES IS THE GUARDIAN’S MADRID
CORRESPONDENT; LISA O’CARROLL IS
BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT
R E I G N I N S PA I N
Key parties in the coalition negotiations
PSOE – Spanish Socialist
Workers’ party
Pedro Sánchez
The PSOE, founded in 1879,
has long been Spain’s centre-left party.
Its leader, the telegenic and charismatic
Pedro Sánchez, is prime minister. The
PSOE went into the election at the head
of a coalition minority government,
relying on the votes of other leftwing
and regional parties.
PP – People’s party
Alberto Núñez Feijóo
The PP is Spain’s centre-right
party, and moved further
to the right under its last leader, Pablo
Casado, in an attempt to outflank Vox.
Its leader, Alberto Feijóo, styles himself
as a moderate but has given his blessing
to regional pacts with Vox and is likely
to need to form a coalition government
with the far-right party if he is to become
prime minister.
Vox
Santiago Abascal
Vox were a fringe party until
2019, when they won 24, then
52, seats in successive elections. They
are “ultra-nationalist”: anti-immigration,
anti-abortion and anti-devolution. They
have already formed pacts with the PP
in some regions.
Sumar
Yolanda Díaz
Sumar is a leftwing coalition,
which includes Podemos,
the previous standard-bearers for the
radical left in Spain. Leader Yolanda Díaz
is a minister in Sánchez’s government.
ERC – Catalan
Republican Left
Oriol Junqueras
Esquerra Republicana
Catalana is staunchly leftist and
the main standard-bearer for the
independence movement. Its leader,
Oriol Junqueras, spent three and
a half years in prison for his part in the
2017-2019 independence struggle.

A N A LY S I S
T H E FA R R I G H T
Has Vox popped?
Hardline policies
turn off voters as
Spaniards buck
European trend
By Ashifa Kassam MADRID
About 10 months ago,
a smiling Santiago
Abascal, the leader of
the far-right Vox party,
proudly described the northern
region of Castilla y León as a model
of what lay ahead for the party.
The sparsely populated region,
where the far right had made
its first foray into a Spanish
regional government since the
dictatorship of Francisco Franco,
was a “showroom” for the party’s
promises to do away with Spanish
laws on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights,
gender equality and violence against
women. Castilla y León, Abascal
added in the interview with Spanish
radio, was “an example of the
alternative Spain needs”.
His words may have proved
prescient, but not in the way he
intended: in last Sunday’s snap
general election, Vox lost five of the
six seats it had won in Castilla y León
in the 2019 vote. This downward
trend played out across Spain, as
Vox’s vote count dropped from
the 15% of 2019 to 12%. The loss –
amounting to about 623,000 votes
– sent the party’s representation
in parliament plummeting from
52 to 33 seats.
Polls had predicted that the
seat count of the far-right party
would drop in last Sunday’s general
election. But the loss was widely
expected to be compensated for by
the party’s emergence as kingmaker,
potentially paving the way for
a coalition government – led by
the conservative People’s party
(PP) – that would have included
the far right for the first time since
Spain returned to democracy after
Franco’s death five decades ago.
Instead the combined result
between the PP and Vox came
to 169 seats, falling short of the
176 needed for a majority in
the 350-seat parliament. While
a potential PP-Vox coalition may be
able to garner one or two votes from
smaller parties, the bulk of these will
be unlikely to agree to any deal that
could ease Vox’s path to power.
The result suggested that Vox’s
hardline attitudes, epitomised
by a massive banner erected in
central Madrid that showed a hand
tossing symbols representing
feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, Catalan
independence, climate crisis
action and communism into a bin,
appeared to have turned off voters.
The party’s foray into regional and
municipal power, where it racked up
headlines over the cancellation of
a movie screening because of a kiss
between two women, an attempted
crackdown on access to abortion,
and its vetoing of a theatrical
adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s
Most smaller parties
are unlikely to agree
to any deal that would
ease Vox’s path to power
DAVID CANALES/SOPA /SHUTTERSTOCK
13
gender-shifting novel Orlando,
may have also proved unpalatable
to some. The disappearance of the
conservative Ciudadanos party –
whose vote is believed to have gone
primarily to the PP – meant Vox’s
seat count may have been slightly
penalised by an electoral system
weighted in favour of larger parties.
While Vox remains the third
most voted-for party nationally,
the results relegate it to political
near-irrelevance. The party failed to
meet the parliamentary threshold to
present no-confidence motions and
challenge the constitutionality of
legislative measures.
Even so, Abascal avoided any
sort of reflection on his party’s
performance. Instead, he lashed
out at the Socialist leader, Pedro
Sánchez. “I would like to point
out something that is bad news
for many Spaniards,” Abascal told
supporters. “Despite losing the
election, Pedro Sánchez can block
the formation of a new government.
Worst still, Pedro Sánchez could
even be invested as prime minister
with the help of communists,
separatists and terrorists.”
Spain’s snap election had taken on
a wider significance across Europe as
analysts painted it as a barometer of
Europeans’ shifting attitude towards
the far right. It was a point driven
home by Italy’s prime minister,
Giorgia Meloni, during a video link
appearance at a Vox rally in Valencia
this month.
Pointing to governments in Italy,
Finland, Sweden, Poland and the
Czech Republic, Meloni argued that
the time had come for “patriots”.
She added: “For all of us it is crucial
that on 23 July a conservative
patriotic alternative is established,
in which Vox plays a leading and
decisive role in the formation of the
new national government.”
But it appears Spain bucked the
tide, pointed out Jordi Évole, one
of Spain’s best-known television
personalities on the left. “The
extreme right, which is in its best
moment across much of Europe, is
losing votes and seats in Spain,” he
wrote on Twitter. “Today, more than
ever, VIVA ESPAÑA.”
ASHIFA KASSAM IS THE GUARDIAN’S
COMMUNITY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT
FOR EUROPE
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
14 The big story
Spanish election
A N A LY S I S
EU ROPE
On the rise
Vox falters, but
far right is faring
better across
the continent
By Jon Henley PARIS
Italy
Giorgia Meloni became western
Europe’s first far-right postwar
prime minister after her Brothers
of Italy won nearly 26% of the vote
in last September’s elections (up
from 4% in 2018). Her strategy since
has been focused on normalisation
– economic orthodoxy, support
for Ukraine, good relations with
Brussels – while quietly pursuing
her culture war at home.
France
Marine Le Pen scored a record
41.46% in last year’s presidential
election, and her far-right National
Rally (RN) went on to win 89 of the
577 seats in parliament, an 11-fold
increase. As the biggest single
opposition party, it is striving to
show discipline and responsibility in
an effort to further sanitise its image
and bury longstanding accusations
of racism and xenophobia. Four
years out from the next presidential
election, polls have suggested Le
Pen would win a runoff held today.
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
The Netherlands
Three nationalist populist parties –
Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Freedom
party (PVV); the libertarian,
conspiracist and pro-Russian Forum
for Democracy (FvD) of Thierry
Baudet; and its supposedly more
moderate offshoot, JA21 – hold 28 of
the Dutch parliament’s 150 seats.
The meteoric rise in provincial
elections this year of a new populist
party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement
(BBB), which fights government
environmental policies, has
underlined the fragmented and
febrile nature of Dutch politics in the
run-up to early elections after the
collapse of Mark Rutte’s coalition
over asylum policies.
Germany
A district election win in June by the
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)
in the eastern town of Sonneberg,
in the state of Thuringia, could
herald the end of the longstanding
“firewall” thrown up by a united
mainstream against the far-right
party. Experts say the anti-AfD front
is crumbling, at least at a local level
in disgruntled eastern Germany, and
the party believes it can win state
elections due next year in Thuringia,
Brandenburg and Saxony.
Austria
One of Europe’s oldest far-right
movements, the Freedom party
(FPÖ), founded in 1956 and first
led by a former Nazi functionary
and SS officer, is polling at 28%,
five points clear of the centre-right
 A leaflet for ÖVP. Its past record and outspoken
the far-right PPV pro-Moscow views may, however,
reads: ‘Make make it difficult for the party to
Netherlands form a coalition even if it wins next
ours again’
JOHN THYS/AFP
year’s vote.
Finland
The influence of the far-right
Finns party in Finland’s new
four-party coalition government
– the most rightwing in the
country’s history – is clear: cutting
refugee quotas, raising the bar for
work-based immigration, making
citizenship harder to obtain and
establishing separate benefit
systems for immigrants and
permanent residents. Since entering
government, one Finns minister
▼ Sweden
resigned after calling for Finland
Democrats voters
to support abortions in Africa to
react to exit
combat the climate crisis while the
poll results last
party leader and finance minister,
September
Riikka Purra, has faced accusations
STEFAN JERREVANG/
REUTERS of making racist comments online.
Sweden
After a narrow win by the rightwing
bloc in elections last September,
the conservative Moderates formed
a minority coalition with two other
centre-right parties that relies – in
exchange for a say in policy – on
the parliamentary backing of
the far-right Sweden Democrats:
the first time the nativist party,
which won 20.5% of the vote, has
had direct input in a government
programme and produced radical
 Marine Le Pen’s
changes in Sweden’s approach to
National Rally
law and order, asylum, immigration
won 89 seats at
and integration.
the last election
JON HENLEY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
STEPHANIE LECOCQ/
REUTERS EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
 15
In-depth reporting and analysis

UKRAINE
Fury as Russia
rains missiles
down on Odesa
Page 18 

INDIA

Dismay over
A
s footage emerged last week
of two women in the state
of Manipur being forcibly
Yet, as many were keen to empha- ▲ Members
sise, the incident in the footage was of the Indian
not new, isolated or unknown to the Assam Congress

government stripped, paraded naked,

publicly molested and allegedly gang
raped, everyone from prime minis-
authorities. Since violence erupted in
early May, between the majority Meitei
and minority Kuki tribes, activists and
demonstrate
against ongoing
ethnic violence in
silence ter Narendra Modi to the chief jus-
tice of India publicly expressed their
academics believe sexual violence has
been systematically used in “revenge
the neighbouring
state of Manipur

on sexual shock and disgust.

Breaking his long silence on the
conflict that has been raging in the
attacks” against women from the Kuki
community by Meitei mobs.
“The heinous crimes committed
BIJU BORO/AFP/GETTY

violence northeastern state for months, Modi

declared that “what happened to the
daughters of Manipur can never be for-
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen given” and that “the entire country has
and Aakash Hassan been shamed” by the attack.
against the Kuki community, the
targeting of Kuki women, the use of
rape as a weapon by Meitei mobs – all
carried out with impunity by these
Continued 
groups – has been kept silent and
16 Spotlight
South Asia
concealed by the state,” said Kham
Khan Suan Hausing, a professor of
political science at the University
of Hyderabad. “It wasn’t until this
video went viral that this overzealous
attempt by the state to control the
narrative has finally been exposed.”
It was only last week, after the video
began trending and the prime minister
spoke out, that police made arrests –
almost 70 days after the case was filed.
The use of rape as a weapon has
been systemic, academics claim. On
4 May, the same day the women in
the video were attacked, two Kuki
women were working in a carwash
30km away when a Meitei mob, armed
with knives and sticks, came hunting
for them. Eyewitnesses and relatives
told the Observer that the two women
were gang-raped.
“They were like beasts. I cannot
comprehend how someone can be
so brutal,” said one co-worker. “The
most shocking part was the women in
the mob who were shouting slogans:
‘Kill, kill these tribals’ while they were ▲ Women set fire pursuing policies that discriminated took many by surprise as Meitei mobs
being raped.” to the house of against the Kukis, through alleged quickly mobilised in their thousands
The two women were dragged on a man accused attempts to take away their land and and began setting fire to Kuki villages,
the road. “I vividly remember their over the mob cast them as illegal immigrants. and attacking Kuki women who fell
chopped hair splattered with blood,” attack in May The spark for the violence was a into their clutches.
said a co-worker who was at the scene. AFP/GETTY court ruling in March, which granted Annie Raja, the general secretary
According to another co-worker, police the Meitei community “scheduled of the National Federation of Indian
arrived and picked them up. “Next day, tribe” status, entitling them to the Women, who recently visited relief
I went to hospital to check on them same economic benefits and quotas camps where thousands displaced in
but I was told by the doctors that they in government jobs and education as the violence are living, said she had
could not be saved,” he said. the minority Kukis, as well as allowing spoken to several Kuki women who
The mother of one of the victims them to buy land in the hills, where had been attacked.
described her devastation at the news, the Kukis predominately live. Fears “From my interactions with the
a pain made worse for the families as began to spread among Kukis that they women, I can say with confidence
they have been unable to collect the would lose their land and security, and there are many cases of sexual vio-
bodies as they fear it is unsafe to travel student groups began to protest. lence,” said Raja. Observers believe
to the Meitei-dominated area. Yet the speed at which the violence that fake news and misinformation
They also alleged the police have took hold and spread across the state that began to spread across social
done nothing to investigate the case. media and WhatsApp on 3 May could
On the day of the incident, a police have played a critical role, as fake
report was filed but made no mention Tribal flashpoints in Manipur accounts of Meitei women being raped
of rape, and it was not until the mother Violence has erupted between Meitei and Kuki people and killed by Kuki mobs, though dis-
of one of the victims filed a new case proved, began to be widely circulated
that the complete events of the mur- in a seemingly coordinated campaign.
ders went on record, according to In response, it appears that Meitei
a police report seen by the Observer. Bhutan mobs began to target Kuki women in
“Since then, we have not heard back “revenge” rape attacks.
from the police,” said the mother who India Imphal China
Hoineilhing Sitlhou, an assistant
filed the case. “My daughter and her Manipur professor of sociology at the University
friend were subjected to brutal torture Bangladesh state of Hyderabad, who has been studying
and were killed in such a painful man- the cases, said she could see a “clear
ner. How can I live in peace?” link” between the systematic spread
Churachandpur
Tensions between the Meitei and Kolkata of fake news, which appeared to be
Kuki communities in Manipur go circulated quickly with the deliber-
back decades. However, resentments Bay of Bengal Myanmar
ate purpose of stirring up ethnic vio-
bec ame heightened under the cur- lence, and the rape attacks on Kuki
rent state government, dominated 200 km women. “When I heard accounts of
by the Meiteis, which was accused of 200 miles these incidents, there was always the

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023


justification from the Meitei mobs
that, ‘You have raped our women so we
will do the same to yours,’” she said.
Such was the case for a 23-year-old
Kuki university student in Imphal
who, in the early hours of 4 May, was
captured by a Meitei mob as she tried
to escape from her university hostel
with her brother.
“Some men started tearing my
clothes. They were shouting that your
people have raped Meitei women and
now you should pay for that,” she said.
They beat her and then dragged her
to a nearby house. “I begged before
them and asked them to let me go. But
they were only shouting that revenge
for a rape is rape,” she said.
“Six men dragged me then to
another room and tore my clothes and
did wrong things with me. I still have
the scars on my body.”
I
n a separate incident in May,
a young Kuki women described
how she was attacked while at an
ATM by a Meitei mob who kid-
napped her and took her to a Meitei-
controlled area, where she was beaten
until unconscious. It was not until she
escaped and was taken to a hospital
that she was informed she had been
raped.
“I went to the police but felt more
threatened there,” she said.
The attacks largely happened in the
first few weeks of the conflict, before
the state was essentially bifurcated
down ethnic lines, with the Meiteis
controlling the valley areas and the
Kukis keeping to the hills.
However, clashes and outbreaks of
violence have continued to erupt, and
those on the ground say the state is still
on the brink of civil war. Confidence
in the government resolving the con-
flict remains low, particularly among
the Kukis, who say they can no longer
live under the oppressions of a Meitei-
dominated state and are now fighting
for an independent state.
“The response to that horrific video
has proven that if the state steps in and
says enough is enough, they can take
action and bring a stop to this conflict,”
said Khan Suan Hausing.
“But as long as the state continues
to play a pivotal role in fomenting
this violence, then the violence will
continue.” Observer
HANNAH ELLIS-PETERSEN IS
THE GUARDIAN’S SOUTH ASIA
CORRESPONDENT; AAKASH HASSAN IS
A JOURNALIST BASED IN KASHMIR
EXPLAINER
INDIA
Incendiary talk
How ethnic
rivalries have
been stoked to
deadly effect
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen
How did the conflict in
Manipur begin?
Manipur, with a population of
slightly more three million people,
has been embroiled in an ethnic
conflict since May, between the
majority Meitei community and the
‘I begged minority Kuki tribe.
India’s north-eastern states have
them to let a history of ethnic rivalries dating
me go. But back to before independence.
they were Recent tensions were driven in part
by the state government, which is
shouting controlled by the Meiteis. It had
that been accused of pursuing policies
that discriminated against Kukis,
revenge including forced evictions.
for a rape The spark for the violence was a
is rape’ court ruling in March that granted
the Meiteis “scheduled tribal
status”, entitling them to the same
economic benefits and quotas in
government jobs and education
as the minority Kukis, as well
as allowing Meiteis to purchase
land in the hills, where the Kukis
predominately live, fuelling fears
their lands, jobs and opportunities
would be taken away.
It prompted protests, mostly by
Kuki student groups. By early May,
it had escalated into all-out violence
between Kuki and Meitei groups.
The ruling was later stayed by the
supreme court, which called it
“factually wrong”.
How has the violence unfolded?
As the clashes spread, villages
were burned down, more than
250 churches belonging to the Kuki
community were destroyed and the
state was split along ethnic lines,
17
with the Meiteis and the Kukis
each defending their territory with
militias. To enter the territory of the
opposing tribe was soon considered
to be a death sentence. As fake news
and misinformation circulated that
Meitei women had been raped and
killed by Kukis, it was reported that
Kuki women began to be targeted
in revenge attacks, which included
rape, torture and assault by Meitei
mobs. There have also been several
reports of beheadings.
So far, more than 140 people have
died in the violence and 60,000
have been displaced. The internet
has been shut down by authorities
in the state 18 times.
How has the government
responded?
Even as the violence escalated, the
response from the central Bharatiya
Janata Party government was
notably muted. The prime minister,
Narendra Modi, was criticised for his
months-long silence on the conflict
and his refusal to visit Manipur. His
home minister, Amit Shah, visited
at the end of May, but failed to bring
about a ceasefire or negotiation.
The Kukis are demanding that the
Manipur chief minister, who is
from the Meitei tribe, step down,
and have shunned the “peace
committee” set up by Shah.
Some have viewed the conflict
through a communal lens and
alleged that the Hindu nationalist
Modi government is not stepping
in to protect the Kukis, who are
Christian, at the hands of the Meitei,
who are Hindu.
The viral video of two Kuki
women being stripped and allegedly
gang raped by a Meitei mob caused
outrage across the country and
prompted Modi to comment on the
issue. It also led the supreme court
to chastise the government for not
getting the situation under control.
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
18 Spotlight
Europe
UKRAINE
‘This is
barbarism’
Shock at
strike on
Odesa
cathedral
Bombardment of Black Sea
port city is part of a campaign
by Moscow to disrupt the
shipping of grain exports
By Shaun Walker ODESA
‘L
ord have mercy, Lord
have mercy, Lord have
mercy.” The priest dabbed
tears from his eyes as his
sonorous voice emerged from loud-
speakers hastily assembled outside
his devastated cathedral, the incan-
tation competing with the crash of
debris being loaded into trucks and
the drilling of repair works on neigh-
bouring buildings.
This was the second time that the
vast, sand-yellow Transfiguration
Cathedral, which sits in the heart of
Odesa’s Unesco-listed historic cen-
tre, had been attacked: in the 1930s, it
was torn down during Joseph Stalin’s
atheism drive. Last Sunday morning,
the rebuilt version was hit during
a Russian airstrike. A missile blew a
large hole in the roof, collapsed the
altar and left several walls charred
by fire.
It was one of several strikes on the
southern port city in the early hours.
Schools, residential buildings and
a revered 19th-century mansion were
also damaged. One person was killed
and 14 were hospitalised.
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
Russia has been hitting Odesa
relentlessly since Moscow pulled out
of a deal allowing Ukrainian grain to
be exported from the city’s Black Sea
ports. The Russian defence ministry
has also threatened to treat commer-
cial ships attempting to dock in Odesa
as military targets in order to ensure
that no grain can leave the city.
“Russia’s current strategy is to destroy
Odesa. They would never really attack
foreign-flagged ships coming to Odesa,
so they are attacking Odesa to make it
clear that it’s too dangerous here,” said
Oleksiy Honcharenko, a Ukrainian MP
from the city. He said Ukraine urgently
needed more air defence systems.
Even by the standards of Russia’s
ruthless war strategy, a missile strike
on a historic cathedral – one that was
consecrated by the patriarch of the
Russian Orthodox Church, no less
– was a shocking development. The
priests were dumbfounded.
“This is barbarism, it’s terrorism.
The people who did this are not people
at all,” said Myroslav Vdodovych, the
cathedral’s chief priest, as he walked
through the ruins in a fluorescent
orange helmet, taking calls on his
mobile phone and directing emer-
gency workers to spots where there
was still rubble to clear.
“I was one of the first people here,
because I got notified when the alarm
Off limits
signals went off. It was a direct hit,
After last summer’s
right in the altar area,” he said.
beach season had
Trying to find positives amid the
been cancelled
ruins, Vdodovych said the cathedral
due to the mining
taking the hit had prevented the mis-
of beaches to
sile from slamming into neighbouring
prevent a Russian
buildings, which had suffered some
amphibious
landing, Odesa’s damage but saw no casualties. “In
authorities this way, we can say the cathedral
deployed anti-mine saved lives.”
nets on several A congregation from a neighbour-
beaches this year ing parish had been directed by their
to allow swimming. priest to forgo mass and come to help
The plan had to with the clearing-up efforts. They
be cancelled after were handed hard hats and scurried
the Kakhovka dam through the cathedral, emerging with
explosion in June chunks of pew, slices of painted angels
washed debris that had fallen from the ceiling, and
including animal twisted remnants of mosaics. One
carcasses and man came out holding missile shards;
sewage down the another had found chunks of silver
Dnipro River and that had come from an icon frame.
into the Black Sea. Older women in headscarves

 Volunteers combed nearby grass verges and
clear rubble from flower beds, fishing out seemingly
Transfiguration endless shards of glass.
Cathedral last The cathedral had been scheduled
Sunday morning
KASIA STREK
to host two services and five weddings
on Sunday, but instead Vdodovych and
Archbishop Diodor of Yuzhe led open-
air prayers early in the afternoon. They
prayed alongside an icon that had been
rescued from the ruins and carefully
cleansed of a thick layer of dust, a gold
and jewel-encrusted copy of an icon
known as the Kasperovskaya Mother
of God, the original of which is held
in another Odesa cathedral and is
believed to protect the city.
“This icon has always saved Odesa;
during the Crimean war, they held
a prayer with it during the British
bombardment of Odesa and a fog
descended on the city, thwarting the
attack,” claimed father Maksimilian,
another of the priests. “The copy was
damaged last night, but it survived by
a miracle,” he said.
The Transfiguration Cathedral
belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox
church, which is one of two major
branches of Orthodoxy in the coun-
try and was until recently associated
with Moscow.
The cathedral, rebuilt after Ukraine
gained independence, was conse-
crated in 2010 by Patriarch Kirill
of Moscow. Kirill has offered full-
throated support for Putin’s war in
Ukraine, blessing troops and stating
in one of his sermons that Russian
soldiers who die in battle are perform-
ing “a sacrifice that cleanses away all
of that person’s sins”.
Since then, the Ukrainian Orthodox
church has denounced the Russian
invasion and declared its independ-
ence from Moscow, but it is still seen
by many Ukrainians as being riddled
with Russian agents. The priests at the
scene, however, were unequivocal in
their condemnation of Russia.
“A church that supports a war
and killing cannot be a real church.
A church can never support war,” said
Vdodovych. “If people don’t respect
‘It was sacred things, they are not people.
The things Patriarch Kirill has said are
a direct hit, against humanity.”
right in the Ukraine’s president vowed revenge
altar area’ for the attacks while Russia’s defence
ministry denied its missile had hit the
Myroslav cathedral, claiming the damage was
Vdodovych done by a Ukrainian defence missile.
Transfiguration SHAUN WALKER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
Cathedral’s CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE
chief priest CORRESPONDENT
EXPLAINER
UKRAINE
Beat the bushels
What was the
Black Sea grain
deal and why did
it collapse?
By Patrick Wintour
What was the Black Sea grain deal?
The Black Sea grain initiative was
negotiated in July 2022 between
Turkey, the UN and Russia as
a way of ensuring that Ukraine, one
of the breadbaskets of the world,
could ensure that grain could
leave its southern ports via the
Bosphorus. The grain could not be
exported in the quantities required
by road or rail through Poland or by
canal and river through Romania.
Turkey was involved because of
the close relationship between its
president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
and Vladimir Putin and because
under the Montreux convention,
signed in 1936, it oversees maritime
traffic in the Bosphorus and
Dardanelles straits.
What did the grain deal promise?
The initiative, one of the few
diplomatic achievements of the
war, allowed for commercial food
and fertiliser exports from Odesa,
Chornomorsk, and Pivdennyi,
overseen by Russian, Turkish,
Ukrainian and UN inspectors.
A separate deal minimised the
effect of sanctions on the export of
Russian food and fertiliser.
Did it succeed?
Despite the acute lack of trust, 33m
tonnes of grain left Ukraine’s ports
in the year to July. The World Food
Programme bought about 750,000
tonnes of Ukrainian grain that was
shipped immediately to places such
as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia
and Sudan. Partly as a result of this,
the price of grain a bushel stabilised
Sound of resistance p51
19
at $800, down from a high of $1,360.
Russia claims the proportion of the
grain that went to the very poorest
countries was less than 4%, but this
ignores the fact that the extra supply
was depressing the price.
What started to go wrong?
Russia started to slow inspections.
In October 2022 there were
10 completed ship inspections a day,
meaning 4.2m metric tonnes left
that month, falling to seven a day
in November and two in May, when
only 1.3m metric tonnes left.
Why did it begin to go wrong?
In essence, Russia felt the second
part of the deal allowing for greater
Russian agricultural exports was
not being honoured by the west.
Moscow claims sanctions on
Russian goods exports have not
been lifted clearly enough to insure
Russian ships carrying food. It also
wanted sanctions lifted on its main
agriculture bank.
Who is to blame for the situation?
The west claims Putin thought the
deal was not worth preserving since
it was allowing Ukrainian coffers
and farmers to benefit from its grain
exports. Genuine efforts were being
made by the UN secretary general,
António Guterres, to meet Putin’s
demands. The west acknowledges
grain exports to the least developing
countries were not returning at the
desired rate.
What happens next?
Russia’s defence ministry has
in effect said any ship leaving
a Ukrainian port will be a legitimate
military target. Turkey, a Nato
member, could threaten to confront
Russia by guiding the grain exports
out of the ports without Moscow’s
permission but that is a high-risk
step. Putin has hinted he is willing to
go back into the deal if his demands
are met, but the bombing of Odesa
port suggests his hint at flexibility
may be designed to stem a potential
loss of political support in the global
south. More likely, a drop in exports
will lead to increased stockpiles in
Ukraine while Russia might increase
the export tax on wheat.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 Opinion p48
20 Spotlight
Europe

A
UNITED KINGDOM s a beaming Rishi Sunak
appeared for a fleeting early-
morning media clip in Ruis-
lip’s Rumbling Tum cafe in
A massive
west London last Friday, anyone tuck-
ing into their fry-ups who was unaware
of the results of last week’s three
Labour win byelections could have been forgiven
for thinking that the prime minister
had secured a huge breakthrough.
– followed by “The Labour party has been acting
like it’s a done deal – the people of
Yet against the distorting prism of ‘People like
Westminster’s expectation game, the
surprise Tory defence was the chink of the idea
light that Sunak needed to obscure the of green
bleak raw data. And within the unusu- policies
ally idiosyncratic Uxbridge contest,
he and his advisers scoured for the until they
secret ingredient that could be used
to reverse his party’s fortunes nation-
wide in the months ahead.
cost them
money’
About 300km away in the Selby and
Ainsty seat, Keir Starmer was experi-

mudslinging Uxbridge just told all of them that

it’s not,” he told the film crew in his
brief visit. “When confronted with
encing an equally confounding outing.
When the Labour leader turned up at
the ground of Selby Town FC to cele-

and mistrust the actual reality of the Labour party,

The fallout from a surprise
defeat in one byelection
overshadowed a record-
breaking success in another
By Michael Savage, Toby Helm
and Skyler King
when there’s an actual choice on a
matter of substance at stake, people
vote Conservative.”
It was a bold claim for a leader who
had just seen his party suffer an aver-
age swing against it of a whopping
21.4% across the byelections, on top of
seeing the majority in Boris Johnson’s
old Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat
slashed from more than 7,000 to less
than 500 by Friday morning.
brate the party’s victory in the North
Yorkshire seat, he wanted the message
to be about a historic Labour break-
through in the Tory heartlands.
Overturning a 20,000 Tory majority
had never been achieved by Labour ▼ Newly elected
before in any byelection. Starmer Labour MP Keir
told the invited audience, which Mather, right,
contained several members of the with the Labour
shadow cabinet and dozens of local leader, Keir
party members, how delighted he was Starmer, in Selby
to be in “Labour Selby and Ainsty”. DANNY LAWSON/PA

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023


Yet when the questions came, they
skated over Labour’s win to another
issue less immediately comfortable:
the reasons for its disappointing fail-
ure to capture Uxbridge and make it
three Tory losses in one night, after a
thumping win by the Liberal Demo-
crats in Somerton and Frome.
Starmer found himself standing in
North Yorkshire being quizzed about
what should be done about the ultra-
low emission zone (Ulez) that the
Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,
is expanding around the capital, and
which the Tories exploited as a cost of
living issue in the Uxbridge campaign.
In the immediate aftermath, the
Tory win in Uxbridge distracted from
the ruling party’s struggles. Yet even
last weekend, an Opinium poll for
the Observer gave Labour a 17-point
lead heading into Westminster’s
summer recess.
It is not hard to see why Labour
officials were frustrated. Not only was
the Ulez expansion a local issue affect-
ing a cluster of seats around London,
it is unlikely to still be the dominant
problem at a general election.
Even senior Labour figures admit,
however, that there were dangers in
the Uxbridge result – not least because
Starmer’s caution leaves some in his
own team wondering what his positive
offer to voters looks like.
Such is the obsession among
Starmer allies to ditch anything that
may prevent Labour seizing power,
one senior figure said there had to be
a party response. “City Hall is going to
have to think about this,” they said. “It
would be disrespectful to voters not to.
People like the idea of green policies
until they stop them doing something
or cost them money.”
By last Saturday, Starmer was
explicit about the dangers of the
Uxbridge result as he addressed a
Labour policy forum in Nottingham.
“That result in Uxbridge demon-
strates there is never any reason to be
complacent and never a reason to rest
on our laurels,” he said. “We are doing
something very wrong if policies put
forward by Labour end up on each and
every Tory leaflet. We’ve got to face up
to that and learn the lessons.”
But has a week of such relatively
small gains really filled Sunak with
confidence, or shown him a credible
route to retaining power? For many of
the mainstream Tory MPs in his team,
there seems to be a genuine belief,
enhanced by the Uxbridge result, that
SWITCHING SIDES
Tactical voting in byelections spells bad news for Tories
By Peter Walker
Searching for positives
after last Thursday’s
three byelections, the
Conservative party chair,
Greg Hands, pointed
out that Labour had lost
its deposit in Somerton
and Frome. The polling
expert Sir John Curtice
had a different view: this
was actually bad news for
the Tories.
Beneath the headline
results – the Tories
shedding huge majorities
to Labour in Selby
and Ainsty, and to the
Liberal Democrats in
Somerton and Frome,
while just clinging on in
Boris Johnson’s former
seat of Uxbridge and
South Ruislip – was
a wealth of detail.
One notable factor
was the way the Greens
took third place – albeit
a distant third – in all
three seats. The Greens’
co-leader Adrian Ramsay
noted that his party was
the only one to increase
its vote share in all three
byelections.
Ramsay castigated
Labour for a failure
“to show clear and
unambiguous leadership”
on policies, notably the
environment, saying
this hampered it in
Uxbridge, where the
expansion of the ultra-low
emission zone was
a significant factor.
With Keir Starmer’s
party shifting closer
to the Conservatives
on several issues
recently, particularly the
decision to maintain the
controversial two-child
benefit limit if it takes
power, the Greens are
hopeful they can push
themselves as a clearer
alternative from the left.
That said, even Martin
Dimery, the popular local
candidate in Somerton
and Frome, who
performed the best by far
among the Greens, won
only 10% of the vote, with
many of his supporters
telling Lib Dem canvassers
they were switching
their choice to help beat
the Conservatives.
As noted by Curtice,
the results show how
much better UK voters are
getting at making tactical
decisions, although this
is seen as easier to do in
a byelection, without the
wider political noise of
a general election.
Thus, in Somerton and
Frome, Labour barely
campaigned and duly won
2.6% of the vote, losing
its £500 ($640) deposit –
this is only returned for
candidates who hit 5% –
but helping the Lib Dems
give the Tories another
bloody nose.
Similarly, in Selby the
Lib Dems finished sixth,
behind the Yorkshire
party and Reform UK,
with many of their votes
going to Labour instead.
In Uxbridge, the Lib Dems
took just 526 votes.
Small numbers can
make a big difference, as
Uxbridge showed. With
some Green voters less
keen to lend their support
to Labour, in the west
London seat the Green
candidate ended up with
893 votes – not a huge
amount, but greater
than the Conservatives’
winning margin of 495.
PETER WALKER IS THE
GUARDIAN’S ACTING DEPUTY
POLITICAL EDITOR
21
▲ New Somerton MP Sarah Dyke and
Lib Dem leader Ed Davey BEN BIRCHALL/PA
Labour is fallible and beatable – but
they are also aware of the political
mountain they face.
“It’s not like the party can’t read
opinion polls,” concedes one minister.
“I think Selby shows the government
is seriously unpopular at the moment,
but Uxbridge shows all hope is not
lost. It’s also a reminder of Labour’s
uncanny ability to snatch defeat from
the jaws of victory.”
Another former minister believes
that, in the Uxbridge victory, they have
seen the beginnings of a strategy to
beat Labour. “It shows that, where the
voters know what a Labour adminis-
tration looks like, they struggle to
support Labour,” they said. “We would
be nuts to try to spin this as anything
other than very worrying. But Starmer
is not winning. He is no Tony Blair. All
is not lost and Sunak is a good, honest
leader. I remain a realistic optimist.”
Yet the Uxbridge result has also had
the effect of emboldening Sunak’s
internal enemies. For the right,
Uxbridge was proof that the Tories
prosper when they put clear blue water
between themselves and Labour. It
was, they argue, another reason for
tax cuts as soon as possible, as well as
ditching green policies.
A hint of Sunak’s upbeat demeanour
has been his willingness to make light
of the Tory predicament. He told
friends he had seen Mission Impossi-
ble: Dead Reckoning Part One – inviting
comparisons with his party’s plight.
The question for many of his MPs
is whether he really is drawing up the
script to overhaul Labour, or if he is in
danger of confusing fact with a more
palatable fiction. Observer
MICHAEL SAVAGE IS THE OBSERVER’S
POLICY EDITOR; TOBY HELM IS
POLITICAL EDITOR; SKYLER KING IS
A LONDON-BASED REPORTER
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 Eyewitness
Greece
‘We are at war
with fire’
Fear and chaos
on Rhodes
By Helena Smith ATHENS
G
reece undertook its largest
evacuation effort in its his-
tory last Sunday, moving
19,000 people – primarily
tourists – from villages and resorts
on the island of Rhodes as wildfires
fanned by high-speed winds raged.
Firefighters across the country were
struggling to contain 82 wildfires, 64 of
which started last Sunday, the hottest
day of the summer so far.
With the aid of water-dropping
planes, authorities were working
around the clock to tame numerous
fires. While the prime minister, Kyri-
akos Mitsotakis, said it was clear the
country was “at war with fire”, efforts
were being concentrated on dousing
blazes on Evia, Corfu and Rhodes.
Warning that “difficult days” lay
ahead with the prediction that tem-
peratures would rise, the centre-right
leader told the Greek parliament: “We
find ourselves at war with fire.”
As wind-whipped infernos raged
for seven consecutive days across land
parched by searing heat, authorities
also stepped up evacuations, order-
ing people to leave hotels and homes.
Holidaymakers described scenes of
panic and chaos on beaches on Rhodes
Aegean Sea Rhodes
Soroni
Faliraki
Rhodes
Archangelos
Monolithos Burnt area
17-23 Jul 2023
Gennadi
Mediterranean Sea
Athens
10 km
10 miles
Source: Copernicus/MODIS
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
where thousands of people waited to
be rescued. One said they saw children
falling into the sea from evacuation
boats as ash fell from the sky. Another
described people abandoning their
belongings on beaches.
Ian Murison, from London, likened
the evacuation to “the end of the
world” as the sea turned black with
soot and people rushed towards boats.
He and his family had walked more
than 6km in scorching heat towards
Gennadi beach. “It was impossible
to get on to coaches because people
just ran. It was literally like the end
of the world and the flames were now
far more visible because of course it’s
night-time,” he told Sky News.
A common refrain from UK tourists
was the shoddy treatment received at
the hands of “invisible” tour operators.
Many voiced shock that other British
tourists had been flown into the island
by travel companies as late as Saturday
night when it was clear the fires were
raging uncontrollably.
Greece experienced the hottest
temperatures in 50 years last week-
end, with the mercury reaching 45C
in the central region of Thessaly. The
hot, dry, windy conditions have been
likened to “super food” for fires.
The human-caused climate crisis
has increased the wildfire season by
about two weeks on average across the
globe and is responsible for a higher
likelihood of fire in southern Europe.
In the face of strong and erratic
winds fanning flames, civil protec-
tion officials in Athens said they had
been left with little choice other than
to enact what they called a “precau-
tionary” operation to move tourists
out of harm’s way.
The European Union sent reinforce-
ments. “Over 450 firefighters and
seven airplanes from the EU have been
operating in Greece as fires sprout
across the country,” the EU commis-
sioner for humanitarian aid and crisis
management, Janez Lenarčič, said last
weekend. The president of the Euro-
pean Commission, Ursula von der
Leyen, said: “I called [Mitsotakis] to
express our full support for Greece,
which is … handling this difficult situ-
ation with professionalism, putting
emphasis on safely evacuating thou-
sands of tourists, and can always count
on European solidarity.”
Agencies contributed to this report
HELENA SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
CORRESPONDENT IN GREECE
 23

 Tourists
evacuate as
a wildfire rages
across Rhodes.
Thousands of
people had to
leave hotels on
the southeastern
coast of the
island as a huge
wildfire spread
quickly, fanned
by strong winds.
EU firefighters
teamed up with
their Greek
counterparts to
battle the blazes
ANADOLU / GETTY

▼ People shelter
in a basketball
stadium after
being evacuated
from their holiday
accommodation
ARGIRIS MANTIKOS/
EUROKINISSI /REUTERS

 People watch ▲ A firefighting

the fires near the helicopter drops
village of Malona. water in a bid
Rhodes police to extinguish
said 16,000 a wildfire near
people had been the eastern
evacuated by land hillside town of
and 3,000 by sea Archangelos
SPYROS BAKALIS/ NICOLAS ECONOMOU/
AFP/GETTY REUTERS

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

 Spotlight
Environment
C A NA DA
Volunteer crews
feel the strain of
record wildfires
Long hours in the field in often unpredictable
conditions are testing the mental health of the
dwindling number of firefighters in rural areas
By Kyler Zeleny PARKLAND COUNTY
and Leyland Cecco VICTORIA
A
wildfire crept – and then
sprinted – towards Fox
Creek, a community of
fewer than 2,000 in north-
west Alberta in May. At one point,
the crackling wall of flames and thick
black smoke moved more than 48km
in a  single day, prompting frantic
evacuations from the town.
“It was terrifying,” said Angela
Martineau, a paramedic. “I was told it
was going to be on my doorstep at this
time, then at this time… [There were]
a lot of anxieties and emotions for those
first six days.” But unlike other locals
who threw belongings into suitcases
and fled, Martineau and her husband,
Wade, stayed to face down the blaze
as volunteer firefighters, determined
to help save their community.
Canada’s record-breaking wildfires
have forced more than 120,000 people
from their homes and burned through
more than 10m hectares– a 1,100%
increase over the 10-year average.
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
Smoke from the fires has drifted
thousands of kilometres to choke
cities across North America.
For crews on the frontline, it is
physically and emotionally exhaust-
ing. Morale took a further hit this
month when two wildfire fighters were
killed on duty. In Canada, a shortage of
▲ Parkland firefighters has exacerbated a challeng-
county fire ing wildfire season. Volunteers make
volunteers check up about 70% of firefighting crews,
for hot spots near playing a central role as first respond-
Entwistle, Alberta ers in rural settings. But they face a
growing crisis of physical and men-
tal exhaustion. As their roles become
▼ Wade and more vital in a hotter, more fire-prone
Angela Martineau country, crew leaders worry their
KYLER ZELENY teams are nearing a breaking point.
When fire threatened Fox Creek,
local crews worked past the point of
exhaustion, at times putting in shifts
longer than 24 hours. Some relief came
when the province’s well-resourced
forestry units arrived. But Alberta
officials soon concluded the commu-
nity couldn’t be saved and ordered
those fire crews to pull out.
The Fox Creek volunteers refused
to leave their home, instead dig-
ging, shovelling and chopping fire
guards into the landscape as the blaze
advanced to within 1.5km of the town
boundary.
“Alberta forestry did not want us to
stay. They said … this town [was] going
to be consumed by fire and we flat out
refused to leave,” said Wade. “With
all the resources we had here, with all
the experience, we felt the town was
defendable – we felt we had a good
plan in place.”
And they were right: the fire never
crossed into Fox Creek.
Stretched provincial and municipal
budgets have made equipping, train-
ing and staffing volunteer departments
increasingly difficult. A changing
climate is producing hotter and faster
fires while rural depopulation means
there are fewer volunteers. In 2016,
126,000 volunteers were serving

as firefighters, but that figure fell to
90,000 last year.
All of this has piled pressure on
frontline crews, for whom mental
health concerns can be intense and
sometimes deadly. In 2018, the fire
department in Grand Cache sent rep-
resentatives to the funerals of six fire-
fighters; all had taken their own lives.
One inescapable reality is that a
volunteer firefighter’s “second life”
on the frontline is a separate, full-
time career, says Brian Cornforth, fire
chief in Parkland county, just west of
Alberta’s capital, Edmonton.
“High-intensity wildfires have put
a tremendous amount of strain physi-
cally and mentally on people,” said
Cornforth, who oversees county fire-
fighters attending to more than 1,000
incidents a year.
As exhaustion mounts, fatigue can
fuel dejection and eventually despair.
“It’s like you’re fighting a losing battle,”
said firefighter Kyle Sherman.
A decade ago, volunteer firefighters
often spent nearly two decades serving
their communities. Today, that num-
ber is down to only five years, largely
because of burnout among volunteers.
To make matters worse, recruitment
targets are not being met. The crisis
is magnified in rural communities,
where dwindling work opportunities
and an exodus to larger centres has left
a smaller, ageing populations.
Some departments have started
offering paid training and perks such
as family events, fuel cards and tax
incentives in an attempt to attract vol-
unteers as well as running Facebook
ads and even stopping people at the
bank or post office, which worked for
more than one department.
Cornforth thinks a national strategy
is needed to ensure the survival of
robust, well-trained and equipped
rural departments.
This year’s fires have made clear
the toll on fire crews. Cornforth’s
team broke down after flames broke
through a fire guard. “They were on
the ground, crying from physical and
emotional exhaustion because they’ve
been fighting a wildfire for 17 hours
straight … they could not express any
other emotion other than tears,” he
said. “We can keep pretending we are
healthy, but we got a real sickness.”
KYLER ZELENY IS A CANADIAN WRITER
AND PHOTOGRAPHER; LEYLAND CECCO
COVERS CANADA FOR THE GUARDIAN
International helplines can be found
at befrienders.org
C L I M AT E E M E RGE NC Y
Extreme
temperatures
are ‘threat to
food sources’
By Phoebe Weston
S
uccessive heatwaves threaten
nature’s ability to provide
Feel the heat food, say researchers, as they
The toll of warn of an “unseen, silent
dying” in our oceans amid record tem-
wildfire season
peratures scorching the Earth.
Heatwaves are ripping through
10m
Hectares burned
Europe, the US and China, with the
global hottest day ever recorded at the
start of July, endangering human life as
by wildfires in well as the land and sea it depends on.
Canada this year “Our food system is global,” said
John Marsham, a professor of atmos-
120k pheric science at the University of
Leeds. “There are growing risks of
Number of simultaneous major crop losses in
people forced different regions, which will really
from their homes affect food availability and prices. This
by these fires is not what we’re seeing right now, but
in the coming decades that’s one of the
90k things I’m really scared of.
The 2018 European heatwave led to
Number of multiple crop failures and loss of yield
volunteers of up to 50% in central and northern
serving as Europe. In 2022, record temperatures
firefighters in in the UK killed fruit and vegetables
2022, down from on the vine.
126,000 in 2016 Heatwaves are expected to become
12 times more frequent by 2040
compared with pre-warming levels.
Although one heatwave might not kill
an ecosystem, longer and more fre-
quent events will mean nature does
not have time to recover.
“People are generally isolated from
the effects of the weather … But if you
talk to farmers anywhere in the world,
they are extremely aware of what the
weather is doing, and the impacts on
their farming,” Marsham said.
Oceanic heatwaves are another
threat to food security. Heat stress
 A failed
causes dramatic die-offs, such as the
wheat crop
2021 “heat dome” along Canada’s
Pacific coast, which killed an estimated
in Afghanistan
WORLD FOOD
1 billion marine animals.
PROGRAMME/ REUTERS Daniela Schmidt, a professor of
25
earth sciences at the University of
Bristol, said: “We often think about
impacts on ecosystems on land
because it’s easy to see – the plants
wilt and animals get too hot. But peo-
ple generally don’t think about marine
heatwaves. That’s what really worries
me – that unseen, silent dying.”
Some of the most vulnerable
ecosystems developed with stable
temperatures year-round, such as
the tropical oceans. Warming of 2C is
expected to essentially wipe out tropi-
cal coral reefs, which have the high-
est biodiversity of any ecosystem, and
support more than 500 million people
worldwide, mostly in poor countries.
“Unless we act fast, those systems
are going to disappear,” Marsham said.
“Some people might not care about
coral reefs, but there’s no part of the
globe that is immune to the impacts
of climate change.”
Schmidt added: “You need plants
for every breath you take. It’s the
oxygen you breathe.”
Research is just starting to scratch
the surface of understanding how
heat affects ecosystems. Under a high-
emissions scenario of 4.4C warming,
41% of land vertebrates will experi-
ence extreme thermal events by 2099,
according to research published in
Nature. Ultimately, more species will
be driven towards extinction.
The environment can, however,
play a role in making extreme heat
more bearable. Nicole Miranda, a
researcher at the Oxford Martin pro-
gramme on the Future of Cooling,
said: “Vegetation and water in our
landscape can serve as ways to pas-
sively cool our surroundings.”
One example is the large-scale
green corridors in Medellín, Colombia,
which have reportedly cut urban heat
by 2C.
PHOEBE WESTON IS A BIODIVERSITY
WRITER FOR THE GUARDIAN
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Health
INDIA tains 17g of sugar – a third of the daily
intake recommended by the World
Health Organization, although there
is nothing on the packaging to warn

How sweet
about its high sugar levels; and the
small print on the back says the drink
is not recommended for children.

talk from Drinks and snacks claiming to ben-

efit consumers are concerning food
campaigners working in India and

Big Food elsewhere in the developing world,

who say that food companies are get-
ting away with marketing ultra-pro-

is fuelling cessed foods, high in sugar and salt,

disease risk
Sugar-laden drinks aimed at
children are just one example
of misleading marketing that
can have devastating effects
By Kaamil Ahmed
by promising health, height, strength,
energy and even happiness.
The result, they say, is a crisis in
rising diabetes and hypertension and
poorly nourished children.
The link between unhealthy diets
and ultra-processed food and drinks
prompted the WHO to issue guidelines
this month recommending that gov-
ernments restrict marketing of foods
high in fat, sugar and salt to children,
because of the harmful effects on
health and nutrition.
Arun Gupta, the head of the think-

T
he bright red bottle of Sting,
an energy drink, catches
Sunita Devi’s eye when she
finds her local shopkeeper
has run out of the biscuits she hoped
to buy to fuel her son through his
homework. She cannot read the Eng-
lish label, but 10-year-old Ajit says it
sounds healthy.
“Stimulates mind, energises body,”
the bottle proclaims. It’s the type of
marketing that helps shop owner Vasu
Gupta sell energy drinks – mostly to
families who have migrated from the
countryside to a slum in Govindpuri
in the Indian capital, Delhi.
But the drink, which is made by
PepsiCo India, is not quite as benefi-
cial as it sounds. A 250ml bottle con-
tank Nutrition Advocacy in Public
Interest – India, said it was a “ticking
timebomb”. “Everybody wants their
child to grow well, tall and free from
disease. Those aspirations are actually
used, emotionally exploited,” he said.
Gupta routinely finds foods mar-
keted towards children that make
significant health claims but, analysis
shows, are high in sugar and highly
processed, such as a whey protein
product called Supermilk targeted at
children as young as four.
The brand behind it, Gritzo, markets
its product with adverts that suggest it
can aid a child’s development into an
athlete, as well as a video with an actor
portraying a “smart mom” claiming
that traditional food “is not necessarily
good enough for today’s generation”.
But when Gupta studied the ingre-
dients, he discovered there was 50.8g
of sugar per 100g – more than half the
contents before milk is added. Even
the protein content could be harmful.
Ashish Verma, another Govindpuri
store owner, said PediaSure, a protein
shake that claims to help growth,
immune functions and brain devel-
opment, was also popular.
“Parents want energy bars and bev-
erages that will keep their children
strong and healthy. Some years ago,
Horlicks advertised that it could help
children pass exams and we finished
our stocks in two days,” said Verma.
▲ Shopkeeper The maker of PediaSure, Abbott,
Vasu Gupta with is fighting a class action lawsuit in
the Sting energy the US disputing its assertion about
drink that claims boosting height, yet the chance these
to ‘stimulate products might live up to their “clini-
mind’ and cally proven” claims keeps consumers
‘energise body’ buying them.
Gupta said celebrities are often used
to promote ultra-processed foods as
an alternative to traditional food.
In December, he wrote to Amitabh
Bachchan after the Bollywood actor
promoted a biscuit brand as equal to
homemade bread for busy parents.
Gupta has focused on tackling
misleading marketing for children’s
foods, and has fought companies mar-
keting baby formula as an alternative
 High-fat and to breastmilk. In 1991, he established
sugary snacks are the Breastfeeding Promotion Net-
often marketed work of India, but said it was hard to
at children keep up with the pace of advertising

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

 FA C T O R Y FA R E
What is ultra-processed food?
Ultra-processed food involves
extremely high levels of
manufacturing to produce. It
includes all formula milk, many
commercially produced baby and
toddler foods, fizzy drinks and
sweets, fast food, snacks, biscuits
and cakes, as well as mass-produced
bread and breakfast cereals, ready
meals and desserts.
What do these foods contain?
Ultra-processed ingredients
include fruit juice concentrates,
maltodextrin, dextrose, golden
syrup, hydrogenated oils,
soya protein isolate, gluten,
“mechanically separated meat”,
organic dried egg whites, as well
as rice and potato starch and
corn fibre. Additives such as
monosodium glutamate, colourings,
thickeners and glazing agents are
also ultra-processed.
Why does it matter?
Ultra-processed food contains
higher levels of salt, sugar, fat and
additives that are associated with
obesity, cancer, type 2 diabetes
and cardiovascular disease. They
also tend to have lower levels of
protein, zinc, magnesium, vitamins
A, C, D, E, B12 and niacin necessary
for a child’s optimal growth and
development. It is also thought that
other mechanisms are at play in
UPFs being associated with worse
health outcomes, including negative
effects on the development of gut
microbiota. Anna Bawden
Photographs by campaigns: “The market has become
Amrit Dhillon very aggressive in terms of promotion.
The industry has used every tactic.”
The NCD alliance, a global network
driving action on non-communicable
disease prevention and care, accused
corporations of using the Covid pan-
demic to increase awareness of their
brands, by donations of their products
during lockdowns, for example.
Research published in the WHO’s
journal in May showed that baby foods
are a particular concern. While there
are global regulations in place to stop
the marketing of breastmilk alterna-
tives for children under six months,
it found “growing-up” formulas were
commonly marketed for consumption
by older infants.
More than 90% of sales of grow-
ing-up formula were in low- and
middle-income countries in 2022, the
WHO said. This trend had helped fuel
the amount of sugar bought through
baby and infant foods, which doubled
in developing countries from just over
400bn grams in 2010 to about 800bn
grams in 2021.
Nutritionist Barry Popkin, who co-
authored the research, said food cor-
porations had “sweetened the world”
by encouraging snacking in places
where it was previously rare. He said
these foods were nutritionally lack-
ing while also giving children a taste
for addictive sweet and salty foods,
increasing their susceptibility to non-
communicable diseases (NCDs). The
WHO’s new guidance on marketing
unhealthy foods says poor diets were
responsible for about 8 million deaths
linked to NCDs in 2019.
“When you get undernutrition
as an infant it stunts you for life, it
affects your body composition and it
increases the amount of fat around the
heart and liver, which we call visceral
fat, and that’s the most dangerous fat,”
said Popkin, because of the fat’s link
to problems such as insulin resistance,
which is the cause of type 2 diabetes.
“So when you see countries like
India, Nepal and African countries,
where you see an increasing amount
of these products fed to infants, let
alone two- to four-year-olds, you’re
just feeding their obesity and enhanc-
ing their desire for sweetness – and it
carries over to later life.”
A
ccording to Popkin, wide-
spread snacking is a rela-
tively new trend that was
pushed through the mar-
keting of multinational food compa-
nies during the 20th century in high-
income countries, to the point where
it has become normal.
Those markets had become satu-
rated and so the companies began
looking elsewhere.
“Industry was marketing it, push-
ing it, making it available, making
the prices attractive, giving it away in
schools, at sporting events. That’s how
they grew the sugary beverage market
and that’s how they grew other snack-
ing markets,” he said. “During Covid,
in every country I’ve worked in, they
were giving away junk food and sugary
beverages to the poor, saying: ‘This
will help you.’”
Public health researcher Edwin
Kwong was part of a team that looked
at how large corporations target
developing countries by buying local
27
▼ PediaSure
protein shakes
claim to
boost height
competitors and investments such as
production plants. This also gave them
sway over governments when fighting
against food regulations by touting the
economic benefits and employment
opportunities they provided.
However, Kwong said any claims
they made about economic or social
benefits of their companies were sim-
ply to drive more market share.
“The only corporate social res-
ponsibility of corporations is profits,
it’s to shareholders. So for them, it is
a market to grow profits, that’s why
they target them. It’s as simple as
that,” he said.
Companies should be held responsi-
ble for the increase of NCDs in develop-
ing countries, he said, and NCDs were
not self-inflicted “lifestyle diseases”,
because aggressive marketing by “big
food” had stripped consumers of their
ability to make healthy food choices.
He added that, while most people in
developing countries understood the
dangers of infectious diseases, they
have not yet grasped the threats to
health and wellbeing posed by NCDs.
“I don’t think people would classify
[the rise of NCDs] as an epidemic, even
though it absolutely is; these diseases
kill a lot of people,” Kwong said. “It’s
about trying to alert people around
the world to this issue, and holding
those responsible accountable. This
includes these large transnational
organisations whose profits continue
to grow – the people responsible for
maiming, injuring, killing a lot of
people are not held to account.”
KAAMIL AHMED IS A REPORTER
ON THE GUARDIAN’S GLOBAL
DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Additional reporting by Amrit Dhillon
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
28 Spotlight
South Asia
N E PA L
‘Tourists do
not feel safe’
Deadly air
crashes cast
long shadow
By Pete Pattisson and Praveen Yadav
KATHMANDU
F
ear, anxiety and resignation
stalk Nepal’s domestic air-
ports. Norwegian tourist Wal-
demar Wergeland is relieved
to have landed safely at Kathmandu’s
domestic terminal. He admitted he
was worried about flying in Nepal. “We
did a lot of research before we made
up our minds to travel by air,” he said.
In the city of Siddharthanagar (also
known as Bhairahawa), Nepali folk
singer Alif Khan said he stopped tak-
ing flights to his performances after a
recent deadly air accident. “I started
travelling by bus, but I got frustrated
by the long traffic jams and landslides
on the way. So even though I’m scared,
I’ve started flying again,” he said.
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
Nepal has a reputation as one of the
world’s most dangerous places to fly.
All Nepali airlines have been banned
from operating in EU airspace since
2013 due to safety concerns.
The country’s air safety record was
in the spotlight again this month,
when a helicopter on a sightseeing
trip to Mount Everest crashed as it
returned to Kathmandu, killing all on
board: five Mexican tourists and the
Nepali pilot. It was the fourth helicop-
ter to crash this year.
In January, 72 people were killed
when a plane crashed on approach to
Pokhara, the gateway to many of the
country’s famous trekking routes. The
previous May, 22 people died when a
plane slammed into a mountain while
flying from Pokhara to the tourist base
of Jomsom; 23 died in another crash on
the same route in 2016.
There were 72 fatal air accidents in
Nepal between 1962 and January 2023,
resulting in 935 fatalities, according to
analysis by the Nepali Times. Experts
say mountainous terrain, unpredict-
able weather, lack of the latest weather
forecasting equipment and a lacka-
daisical approach to safety are largely
to blame. More than 90% of fatalities
have occurred when aircraft have hit
mountains, often due to poor visibil-
ity, the Nepali Times reports.
Recent accidents have involved
experienced pilots, suggesting com-
placency or overconfidence may also
play a part. Captains, pilots or other
aviation employees were suspended
or removed from duty for breaching
safety regulations on 11 occasions
between late March and late June this
year, according to statements issued
by the Civil Aviation Authority of
Nepal. Six of these incidents involved
helicopter pilots.
And yet, the rapid expansion of
domestic air travel since its privati-
sation in the 1990s has brought huge
benefits. In the mountainous north,
small planes and helicopters are a life-
line, ferrying goods up remote valleys
and people facing medical emergen-
cies to hospitals in Kathmandu.
Between 2011 and 2019, the number
of passengers on domestic flights more
than doubled to 3.3 million. In 2019,
the country had 32 operational airports
served by 19 operators.
This growth has also transformed
tourism, making trekking routes
and tourist sites more accessible and
thereby generating thousands of jobs
in one of the poorest countries in Asia.
▲ The scene at Helicopters save trekkers suffering
the site of a crash from life-threatening altitude sickness
near Pokhara in and climbers trapped on the slopes of
January, where some of the world’s highest peaks.
72 people died Nepal’s poor air safety record is put-
KRISHNA MANI BARAL/ ting these gains at risk, say experts and
EPA
tourism operators. While the overall
number of visitors has almost returned
to pre-Covid levels – when about
1.2 million a year visited the coun-
try – travellers appear to be avoiding
specific routes and airlines.
After the crash in Pokhara in Janu-
ary, the city’s tourist spots remained
empty for weeks, said Kunda Dixit, the
editor of the Nepali Times. “There is
long-term impact as Nepal gets a bad
reputation for air safety,” he said.
Travelling by road is no better. More
72
than 2,700 people died and 10,000 suf-
fered serious injuries in road accidents
in Nepal in 2019. “Tourists do not feel
The number safe travelling by either air or land,”
of fatal air said Bijay Poudel, who runs trips out
accidents in of Kathmandu and Pokhara.
Nepal between Chief among the EU’s concerns is
1962 and 2023 that Nepal’s civil aviation authority
is both the operator and regulator of
90
the aviation sector. Experts say this
dual function means there is a lack of
independent oversight.
Percentage of “We’re suffering because of incom-
aircraft fatalities petence,” said Raj Gyawali, who runs a
caused by hitting responsible-tourism business. “We’ve
mountains. The got a natural hospitality that works in
topography and tourism’s favour, but if we don’t profes-
poor visibility sionalise, we’ll be stuck where we are.”
make flying in
PETE PATTISSON IS A JOURNALIST
Nepal especially BASED IN KATHMANDU; PRAVEEN YADAV
dangerous IS A JOURNALIST BASED IN NEPAL
 Spotlight 29
Asia Pacific
NEW ZEALAND “Much like our birds, they really ‘Much like
captivate people. They’re so unique
and are something to look out for when our birds,
you’re in the bush anywhere around they really
The fungi
the country,” said Sisson. captivate
In May, Sisson heard that the visitor
centre in Twizel – a small town known people.
winning as the gateway to the South Island –
was fielding more inquiries about
fungi than birds. After dwelling in the
They’re so
unique’
hearts and shadows of ancient towering trees and
gawky flightless birds, fungi might be Liv Sisson

minds on having their time in the spotlight.

“There’s way more fungi lovers out
there than I even realised, and there
Author of Fungi
of Aotearoa

forest floors are new people coming to the fold all

the time,” said Sisson.  The blue-hued
She said that during Covid lock- Entoloma
downs, people took the time to slow hochstetteri, or
By Gabi Lardies AUCKLAND down and look closely, and started werewere-kōkako
paying attention to the hot lips, slip- fungus

O
ne day, the forest floor might
be filled with leaf litter, soft
decomposing logs and tiny
tree saplings. The next, the
logs flush with gilled oyster mush-
rooms, rivers of brightly coloured
waxgills or puffballs – white orbs, as
big as footballs, suddenly appear in
the undergrowth.
Such is the curious world of New
Zealand’s fungi, which like the island
nation’s flora and fauna, have evolved
in isolation into more than 20,000
unusual and endemic species. Most
fungi are too small to be visible, and
of those that you can see, most aren’t
mushrooms – they’re lichen, moulds,
mildews, rusts and smuts.
They grow in a mix of shapes and
pery jacks and eyelash cups.
“It just boomed,” said Kirsty Wil-
liams, a member of the Fungi Gals, a
group of four friends who have been
“addicted” to fungi for more than a
decade and can often be found in
forests on their hands and knees
admiring the specimens.
“You see your first blue Entoloma
and you’re hooked,” said Williams.
The Entoloma hochstetteri – or
werewere-kōkako in the indigenous
Māori language – is a sky-blue mush-
room with a long slender stipe. It grows
on forest floors but is not commonly
seen. The prized Entoloma appears on
the NZ$50 note and in Māori folklore.
Another favourite of the group is the
fleshy Gloiocephala rubescens, which
only grows on rotting nikau palm
fronds. Finding one elicits cries of glee.
The strange beauty of fungi is all the
more alluring for their transience. Wil-
liams said the fungi pops up “boom,
boom, boom … it’s magical. A week
later, there’s absolutely nothing.”
Yet the growing popularity comes
with concern and the group cautions
spotters to be mindful of protecting
the species and their habitat.
“We don’t go in and move things
or pick things,” said Annie Rogers,
another member of the group. “We go
with a sense of reverence to being out ▼ The New
there and how amazing everything is. Zealand native
We are visitors, just looking.” Hygrocybe
GABI LARDIES IS A WRITER AND procera fungus
JOURNALIST FROM NEW ZEALAND PAULA VIGUS

sizes, from delicate light-green wisps

and glistening jellies, to bright orange
lattices and gnarled black tongues. The
giant puffball can grow more than
a metre in diameter, according to Liv
Sisson, the author of the field guide
Fungi of Aotearoa. She said they have
a habit of appearing out of nowhere.
“I was walking down this path,
where days before there was noth-
ing. I turned a corner and there were
20 of them, all the size of my head. It
was like these gigantic soccer balls had
fallen out of the sky,” she said.
Interest in fungi is growing. Hard-
ware stores in New Zealand sell grow-
ing kits, health stores offer mushroom
elixirs and academics are looking into
medicinal uses for native hallucino-
gens. Specialist online interest groups
are booming both with members and
activity, while some tourism opera-
tors are beckoning visitors with the
“spellbinding world of mushrooms”.
30 Spotlight
Science
Illustrations by RYAN GILLET
M ET EOROLOGY
Rain or
shine
By Hannah Climate anxiety is fuelling our
Marriott
interest in weather forecasts
and a growing range of apps
that cater for all conditions
O
ne day in 2020, close to
the beginning of the
Covid-19 pandemic,
Matt Rickett real-
ised he was checking
weather apps all the
time. He immediately understood
why: “Everything felt so unpredict-
able, so out of control,” he said. “Just
knowing that something was going to
happen, tomorrow, that people said
was gonna happen, was reassuring.”
The next year Rickett, who lives in
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
Austin, Texas, decided to stop using
social media: “I didn’t like the control
it had over my life,” he said. “But I still
had the energy, the need to look at my
phone, for some reason. So I got even
more into weather.”
He checks apps roughly every
couple of hours. After much trial and
error, he’s decided he likes Weather
Underground and Foreca the best.
He also uses apps’ radar functions to
try to track storms and precipitation.
When he boards a plane, he checks the
flight path using radar, too, so he has
a better sense of whether to expect a
bumpy landing.
The temperature in Austin has been
40C-plus for weeks; he’ll keep check-
ing the apps, even when he knows no
change is likely. Or else he looks at the
weather in other places, where it is less
hot, and he has family, and thinks: “Oh,
maybe I can go there for a little bit.”
It’s behaviour that Jess Green,
who lives in Liverpool, England,
might relate to. During last summer’s
unprecedented heatwave in the UK,
she said: “There was a lot of talk of:
‘Will we make it to 40C?’ I kept check-
ing in the hope that we wouldn’t.” She
would watch the numbers rise on her
app and would then feel relieved to see
them peak, thinking: “We’re on our
way down; and things haven’t burst
into flames.” She would check different
locations. “I would think: so it’s not a
record temperature in Liverpool today.
That’s great. But what about London?”

She has three weather apps on her
smartphone, but recently a widget
has started popping up, unbidden,
on Microsoft Edge on her computer.
“It asks: ‘Do you want to know about
record temperatures today?’” Then a
quiz appears, asking whether the day’s
temperature is above or below aver-
age, historically.
“That has made my obsession
quite a lot worse,” she said. In many
ways, she points out, it would be odd
not to feel anxious, given the climate
emergency. “But it’s a bit like the pan-
demic. It’s unprecedented, so it’s hard
to tell if your anxiety is proportional
to the threat you’re feeling.”
Preoccupation with weather apps is
commonplace in our current unsettled
atmosphere. On social media there is
almost as much chat about weather
apps as there is about the weather:
much of it is ire about inaccurate fore-
casts. There is still palpable grief, in the
wake of the closure of the short-term
weather prediction app Dark Sky, late
last year, after its acquisition by Apple.
In April, when Apple’s weather app
went down, there was such outrage
that the temporary glitch became
international news.
Fifty per cent of US smartphone
users regularly use weather apps;
according to Statista, weather apps
will make approximately $1.5bn in rev-
enue in 2023, up from $530m in 2017.
Jeremiah Lasquety-Reyes, a senior
analyst for Statista, said this new
weather app ecosystem is only going
to grow, owing to the climate crisis, as
well as a general trend towards “digit-
ising one’s life and schedule”.
There are certainly plenty out there:
more than 10,000 apps have the word
“weather” in their name in Android
and iPhone app stores.
Jennifer Simms lives in Texas
where, she said: “It’s fucking hot, girl.
It’s soul-sucking.” One of her favourite
apps is called What the Forecast??!,
which provides light relief on swel-
tering hot days with forecasts that
read: “You don’t have to look. I’m
fairly sure the thermometer just says:
‘Satan’s butthole.’”
Simms, 65, has lived through two
tornadoes, including one that “blew
out all the windows in the back of my
house. Little shards of glass stuck in
the walls.” Having not cared about the
weather in her 40s and 50s, Simms
said she now checks three apps,
watches storms on their radar func-
tions, is signed up to severe weather
notifications from the National
Weather Service and watches the
weather on television.
The climate crisis fuels her anxiety.
“Our weather is so crazy now,” she said,
of the recent 46C Texas weather. She
added that there are no longer tornado
sirens in her town, so extreme alerts
on her phone are a matter of survival.
Weather apps offer multiple data
points, from the timings of sunrise and
sunset to local pollen levels. Some feel
increasingly important as the weather
gets worse, like the “feels like” stat,
which estimates how unbearable, or
otherwise, the heat really is, taking
variables including humidity and wind
into account, or air quality index maps
that much of the east coast became
glued to during the hazy days of smoke
from Canadian wildfires.
To some extent, this boom of
information is reflective of real devel-
opments in the meteorology world.
Eric Floehr, the CEO and founder of
ForecastWatch, a company that analy-
ses the accuracy of weather forecasts,
said forecasts are more accurate now
than ever before, and they update
more often, too – some as frequently
as every 15 minutes. “So that’s more
relevant and timely. And because it’s
more relevant and timely, you want to
look at it more,” he said.
Floehr, who lives in Ohio,
“obsessively” checks one app, Radar-
Scope, for tornadoes when there are
nearby storms. He said a recent boom
in accessibility and real-time access to
‘People see the weather
is becoming more
extreme. Hopefully that
will result in action’
radar technology has played a huge
role in the boom. Dark Sky was a pio-
neer of “radar interpolation” – looking
at a radar image and a storm’s velocity
to predict when it will arrive – which
felt like magic to many when they first
used it. It also made weather forecast-
ing feel like a news feed to be followed.
Little wonder that weather apps
may be getting some people hooked.
Anna Lembke, the psychiatrist and
author of Dopamine Nation: Finding
Balance in the Age of Indulgence, said
weather apps are very attractive to our
dopamine-seeking brains. “Not just
the quantification but also the way
that those numbers are displayed,
the graphs and the charts. The brain
31
has a way of really glomming on to
numbers,” she said.
It is perhaps ironic, then, that even
as many become highly attached to
weather apps, the question of whether
they actually work very well remains
unclear. Many say that it is merely our
hyperawareness of the weather that
gives the impression that forecasts are
getting worse.
E
ven today, with more
sophisticated weather
forecasts than we have
ever had before, there
are things forecasting
models don’t do well,
including long- and medium-term
predictions of “convective thunder-
storms”, and predicting “precipitation
amounts, especially with snow”. Fore-
casts are also better at “climatologi-
cally normal” forecasts, rather than
at predicting extremes, Floehr said.
And in certain areas, where there is a
microclimate, or less radar coverage,
they are less likely to be accurate.
Many US meteorologists say they
won’t use apps, however; they advise
checking the National Weather Ser-
vice’s website as a first port of call.
Though many apps use the same data
as the National Weather Service, it is
often unclear which parts of the data
they use, and how their models tweak
it. There is an argument, too, that pre-
senting the weather largely as a series
of numbers, or symbols, is an oversim-
plification that confuses the average
smartphone user (for example, some
see 50% next to a rain cloud on an app
and think it will be raining for 50% of
the day, but, as a human meteorologist
delivering a forecast would explain,
it actually means that there is a 50%
chance of precipitation).
Even if they are, occasionally, a bit
inaccurate, said Green, checking them
feels like it helps. “It definitely gives
you a sense of control.”
After three years of lockdowns and
cancelled plans, wildfires, storms and
heatwaves, no wonder many of us are
frequently checking weather apps, out
of fear, out of hope, acutely aware
of the rarity of perfect conditions.
Perhaps it’s no bad thing. “I think
people are more in tune,” said Floehr.
“They see that the weather is becom-
ing more extreme. Hopefully that will
result in action. But for now, at least,
it’s resulting in interest.”
HANNAH MARRIOTT IS A WRITER BASED
IN NEW YORK
28 July
l 2023 The
Th Guardian
G di Weekly
W kl
32 Spotlight
North America
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Will strikes
spell trouble
for Biden in
a summer of
discontent?
By David Smith WASHINGTON
I
t became known as the winter
of discontent. After the Labour
government tried to freeze
wages to stem inflation, Britain
was convulsed by labour strikes and
disruptions in public services, leading
to a fierce political backlash that swept
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives
into power.
Forty-five years later, a summer of
strikes is disrupting industries from
coast to coast in America. Unions have
launched or are threatening stoppages
that could affect everything from air-
line travel and parcel deliveries to car
manufacturing and film and TV pro-
duction. They could also disrupt the
economic growth that Joe Biden wants
to campaign on in 2024.
“It takes him off message because
strikes are visual, strikes are hot
video, and they’re a focal point for
media,” said John Zogby, an author
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
and pollster. “It becomes lame trying
to explain, ‘But the numbers are good,
but the numbers are good, but the
numbers are getting better,’ when the
video just doesn’t appear to show it.”
The coronavirus pandemic had
many aftershocks and labour turmoil
may be among them. Hollywood pro-
duction is shut down as the Writers
Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are
striking, partially over concerns about
streaming revenues as well as artificial
intelligence taking away jobs from cre-
ative workers. The action has put films
and TV shows in limbo and could cost
the US economy an estimated $3bn.
There is also the prospect of a
United Auto Workers strike as contract
talks get under way and the industry
wrestles with a transition toward elec-
tric vehicles. The Teamsters union said
its drivers may walk off the job as they
struggle to reach a new contract with
UPS (United Parcel Service). And more
than 26,000 flight attendants at Ameri-
can Airlines are set to hold a strike vote
over the coming weeks.
Drexel Heard, a public affairs strate-
gist based in Los Angeles, said: “This is
what I believe is the start of a trend that
was inevitable post-pandemic: work-
ers knowing and understanding that
things cannot go back to normal. We
all work hybrid now, for the most part.
“People are understanding that
their need for healthcare is some-
thing that’s critical. Their need for
better pay and better work hours is
essential, especially when we have
things that happen like a pandemic,
and people want to feel safe. The only
people who are fighting for workers’
rights are unions.”
Scenes of industrial strife heading
 Los Angeles into winter would provide fodder for
restaurant and rightwing media who already accuse
hotel workers Biden of embracing leftwing ideas.
started industrial It might also create a headache for
action on 4 July a president focusing much of his re-
ETIENNE LAURENT/EPA election campaign on the strength
of the economy, under the slogan
“Bidenomics”. The president said:
“We have a plan that’s turning things
around pretty quickly. ‘Bidenomics’
is just another way of saying, ‘Restore
the American Dream’.”
But that message is still struggling
to break through with voters. In a
CNBC All-America Economic Survey,
37% approve of Biden’s handling of
the economy and 58% disapprove.
In a Monmouth University poll, only
three in 10 Americans feel the country
is doing a better job recovering eco-
National walkouts nomically than the rest of the world
Among other since the pandemic.
examples across There is a baffling disconnect
the country, between these opinions and data that
thousands of
shows America defying predictions of
hotel workers in recession and curbing price rises faster
Los Angeles went than other major economies. Inflation
on strike in July,
while healthcare
workers at a major
has fallen from 9% to 3% and is now at
its lowest point in more than two years.
White House officials say unions are
Chicago hospital
are planning to do
empowered to press for more benefits
and better pay because of the strong
likewise in a dispute
over wages and
lack of staffing.
job market. Unemployment is just
3.6% and job openings relatively high.
Widespread industrial action would
Across June,
there were
localised walkouts
pose a fresh test for Biden, who has
already expressed support for the
striking Hollywood actors and writers.
at Amazon,
Speaking in Philadelphia recently,
McDonald’s and
Biden was careful to align himself with
Starbucks, while
workers and unions against Wall Street
hundreds of
and companies that made record-high
journalists over
eight states also profits during the pandemic.
went on strike to Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the
demand an end Brookings Institution thinktank, said:
to painful cost- “It’s my distinct impression that sup-
cutting measures port for labour unions has gone up sig-
and a change nificantly so we’re not talking about
of leadership [British miners’ leader] Arthur Scargill
at Gannett, the in the 1970s. We’re talking about an
country’s biggest extended period during which a lot of
newspaper chain. Americans believe that workers have
got the short end of the stick.
“They’re much less worried about
‘big labour’ than they used to be, in
part because labour isn’t as big as used
to be, especially in the private sector
where labour unions have weakened
enormously. There’s a basic sense of
fair play operating to increase sup-
port for not just working people but
organised labour.”
DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

MEXICO
Gang killing
of vigilante
leader shows
failure to
curb cartels
By Tom Phillips and Analy Nuño
GUADALAJARA
M
ore than 150,000 people
have been murdered
since Mexico’s current
president took power,
and Hipólito Mora suspected he would
join them. “I knew this day would
come,” the lime farmer turned vigi-
lante rebel wrote in a farewell message
to be published in the event that it did.
Mora’s premonition was proved
right. He was killed in a blizzard of
nearly 1,000 bullets in one of Mexico’s
most violence-stricken states at the
end of June.
Hours after Mora’s incinerated
truck was towed from the crime scene,
the 67-year-old’s trademark hat was
placed on his coffin at a wake most
people were too afraid to attend.
“We want justice. This cannot go
unpunished,” his brother, Guadalupe
Mora, said.
The murder of Mora – whose
campaign against the cartels had made
him a national celebrity – has put the
spotlight back on Mexico’s unfathoma-
bly brutal crime conflict, which claimed
more than 30,000 lives last year.
President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, or Amlo, won power in 2018
vowing to “pacify” his country with a
dramatic, socially focused change in
security policy he called “abrazos no
balazos” – “hugs not bullets”.
“In three years there will be no more
war,” he said on the campaign trail.
But as López Obrador’s six-year
term draws to a close ahead of next
June’s presidential election, there is
scant sign of peace.
Barely a day goes by without reports
of bloodshed and ultra-violence in one
33
of Mexico’s 31 states: a newspaper if you somehow touch or disrupt the ▼ Hipólito Mora’s
correspondent killed in Nayarit, eight equilibrium of the system, you are at hat sits on his
call-centre workers dismembered and risk of dying.” coffin at his wake
six people killed in an bomb attack on Organised crime expert Guadalupe EDUARDO VERDUGO/AP
the police in Jalisco, or the besieging of Correa-Cabrera described Mora’s mur-
the state capital of Guerrero by thou- der as symptomatic of a broader truth.
sands of protesters after two alleged “It appears organised crime has the
gangsters were detained.
On 29 June, it was the shooting
ability to ... decide who lives and who
doesn’t,” she said.
of Mora, one of the leaders of a 2013 Last month, those groups decided
civilian uprising against the Knights
Templar cartel, that grabbed headlines.
Mora’s time had come. The victim’s
brother pointed the finger at two noto-
As the outspoken former vigilante
travelled through the rural community
where he was born and raised, he was
rious local cartel bosses who have yet
to be detained.
“If there’s no justice … we will have
ambushed by two dozen gunmen and
killed alongside three bodyguards.
to get it ourselves [and] we, the people,
will have to rise up in arms once again,”
Security expert Romain Le Cour said Guadalupe Mora vowed.
Mora’s assassination was the result of a When the Guardian met Hipólito
region plunged into bloodshed by col- Mora in Michoacán last year, he had Amlo’s promises
laboration between corrupt politicians just come back from lobbying govern- The leftwing
and narco-traffickers who dominate ment officials over the security crisis. populist Andrés
the western state of Michoacán. “We can no longer bear so much vio- Manuel López
Le Cour said Amlo had fulfilled lence,” Mora told Mexico’s security Obrador vowed to
part of his campaign promise with chief, Rosa Icela Velázquez. tackle the social
massive public spending on social In his final WhatsApp message to roots of crime,
programmes. But most pledges had the Guardian, a few months before offering vocational
fallen by the wayside, as the military his death, Mora forwarded a series of training to more
was empowered rather than extracted images picturing masked cartel gun- than 2.3 million
from the fight against crime. men who had commandeered a town disadvantaged
“[Hugs not bullets] was a very in the mountains near his home. “Just young people
clever campaign slogan,” Le Cour said. look at what they are doing in Mexico,” at risk of being
But the “constant flow of incredible, Mora wrote before signing off: “Salu- ensnared by the
insane, dramatic” outbreaks of vio- dos y abrazos” – greetings and hugs. cartels, promising
to slash the
lence made it clear it had not worked. At 2.31pm on 29 June, his mobile
murder rate from
“It’s hard today to find a glimpse phone went dead.
an average of
of hope,” he said. “In so many parts
TOM PHILLIPS IS THE GUARDIAN’S 89 killings per day.
of Michoacán – and so many parts of LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT; Amlo also pledged
Mexico – if you are a candidate, or a ANALY NUÑO IS A JOURNALIST BASED to chair daily 6am
mayor, or an activist or a journalist, IN MEXICO
security meetings
and create
a 60,000-strong
“National Guard”.
But those measures
have yet to pay off,
with the security
force used mostly
to hunt Central
American migrants.
Mexico now has an
average of about
96 murders a day.
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
36 The tragedy of Khartoum
E THOUGHT IT WOULD LAST A DAY, TWO
AT most. When the sound of gunfire
began to ring around parts of Khartoum
early one Saturday in April, calls from
family and friends in the city sounded
relatively little alarm. People were hear-
ing that there had been skirmishes near
the airport, and reported seeing pickup
trucks ferrying troops at speed across the city. Those nearer central
Khartoum said they heard the sound of artillery, but others said there
was no gunfire, only loud explosions, and speculated that perhaps
they were the result of military training exercises. A minority sus-
pected it was the start of a clash between two military factions that
had been jostling for power for months, but no one could foresee the
scale of what was about to happen. Whatever it was, I was convinced
there was no cause for alarm. I had been in Khartoum only a few weeks
earlier and, even though the city felt tense, life was perfectly normal.
“It’ll die down,” an old friend told me. “It always does.”
It didn’t. In the 48 hours after the first reports of trouble, life in
Khartoum shattered. I was in London, and the news came in a horror
reel of videos posted on social media and sent on WhatsApp. People
trying to leave from Khartoum airport crouched in terror, sheltering
from loud explosions. Planes preparing for takeoff were bombed on
the runway. Military aircraft screeched across the skies of the capital,
clumsily bombing militia targets positioned in civilian areas and
levelling residential neighbourhoods. Tanks rolled through the city,
crushing cars under their tracks. It was the last days of Ramadan, and
matronly scolding and was allowed to pass. “They were bewildered
kids,” a relative said, after she too was stopped at a checkpoint and
interrogated. “Their eyes were popping out of their heads.” She was
surprised to find them as anxious as she was – jittery, trigger-happy
and, suddenly, with more power than they expected.
The RSF was there not just to fight the army for control of the
capital, but to ravage the urban inhabitants as well. Its members
were drawn from fighting forces in a lawless region in the west of the
country, abandoned by central government, devastated by droughts
and famine, where competition between tribes for land and trading
routes was fierce. To the militia, war was a living.
Within the first few days of hostilities, banks, ATMs, mobile money
transfer apps and remittance agencies all stopped working. No one
had any contingency plans. Most had no stockpiles and, within days,
food and cash began to run out. Mobile phone credit ran out and, as
the fighting intensified and more infrastructure was hit, phone and
internet networks began to flicker. Family and friends began to go
dark. My sleep became a feverish half-slumber. Each time I jolted
awake, my clammy hand reached for the phone, which more often
than not displayed no alerts and brought no relief.
There was no fighting around my family home, and my sister and
her husband, newly married, who lived there, resolutely refused to
leave. Once safe routes had been established to Egypt, we tried to
persuade them to flee. Every day I would call, and every day they
would report, with an eerie, jolly tone of reassurance, that things
were calm where they were.
Their refusal to leave was, in part, denial that the
the streets, which had, only hours before, been full of people prepar-
ing for Eid festivities, were strewn with dead bodies.
By the Monday, central Khartoum was a battleground. People
clustered indoors, as far from the windows as possible. Even as it
became clear that things were deteriorating quickly, I still held on to
the irrational belief that it would all “die down”. That belief was shaken
as videos of dead bodies decomposing in cars were posted on social
media, and family members sent photos of their walls pockmarked
with bullet holes. Since a revolution in 2019 had toppled the Sudanese
president Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for 30 years, Khar-
toum had become accustomed to episodes of civil unrest followed
by security crackdowns. This was different.
News reports said gunfire and mortars were being exchanged
between a powerful militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and the
army. After Bashir’s removal, the army and the RSF had taken over
in a tense partnership that had quickly fractured. Anyone trying to
escape the city was caught between airstrikes from the army and
ground attacks by the RSF, who drove through the streets, parked their
tanks and trucks outside people’s homes and squatted alongside main
thoroughfares. “They’re right outside our home,” a friend told me.
By the middle of the first week, RSF troops had taken over Khar-
toum’s airport. That was the moment I knew there was no going back.
The militia quickly spread into all of the city’s central neighbourhoods,
erected checkpoints and began to harass residents, enter houses and
demand money and food.
It seemed, in the blur of those early days, that the RSF was chaotic
and lacking in discipline. A family friend was stopped by young RSF
troops. After a tense standoff she apparently cowed them with her
People kept away from the windows … family members
sent photos of their walls pockmarked with bullet holes
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
 Previous page: city could unravel so quickly and, in part, to fear of
Smoke rises leaving their lives behind. But their resolve soon
after aerial crumbled in the face of reality: two weeks into the
bombardments; fighting they fled, making a treacherous journey to
right: a home hit a small village in the east of Sudan, but the relief
by a shell of their departure was quickly replaced by anxi-
ety as I traced their slow journey through battle
sites and checkpoints, wrenched from all that they knew, displaced,
hungry, sun-struck, sleeping rough, thrust into the unknown. Along
with them, millions scattered across Sudan and into neighbouring
countries. Khartoum, which had for decades sat peacefully along the
River Nile, was a war zone.
A SHORT IRON BRIDGE SITS ON THE SPOT where the Blue Nile and
White Nile meet in Khartoum. Their waters join and flow northwards
to Egypt and finally, into the Mediterranean. When I was a child in
the 1980s, we crossed that bridge every Friday on the way to Omdur-
man, a city that is part of greater Khartoum, to visit my maternal
grandparents. The journey was long, so my father sweetened it with
treats: on the way there, an oily falafel sandwich and cold bottle of
soda from one of the kiosks near the river. On the way back, a cone
of ice-cream from a small, dingy shop that sold one unidentifiable
flavour of soft serve. The rest of the entertainment was provided by
the changing scenery. The trip from the far east of Khartoum to the
far west of Omdurman covered the span of the city at the time, its old
wealth displayed in large houses with elaborately designed gates and
fences, its grand colonial-era government buildings and presidential
palace and, finally, the small homes of uprooted elders such as my

grandparents, who had followed their children to the city. My siblings
and I gave nicknames to landmarks and flamboyantly saluted the two
smartly dressed guards who stood outside the presidential palace as
we drove past. Without fail, they would tap the butts of their rifles
on the ground in response. It never got old.
The Khartoum I grew up in was a peaceful, scenic place, from which
the rest of the country seemed hazy and remote. By early 2023, that
drive to Omdurman was along busier streets. The riverside kiosks
had been replaced by bustling restaurants. In the 80s and 90s, many
of Khartoum’s doctors, engineers and academics had moved to the
Gulf; their remittances funded the growth of an urban middle class
that built modern apartments and handsome villas across the city. An
oil boom that started in the early 2000s tempted most of them back.
Expensive private hospitals opened. By 2010, there were 20 universi-
ties in Khartoum, up from three in the 80s. Most of them were private,
with medical schools being the most expensive and the most popular.
MOHAMED NURELDIN ABDALLAH/REUTERS; AFP/GETTY
They exported doctors to the UK, Ireland and the Gulf.
But for many, Khartoum remained a harsh, inhospitable place.
Those who could afford to, drove everywhere. Ditches crisscrossed
the city to drain rainwater, which lay there until it evaporated under
the intense sun, but not before it had bred a plague of mosquitoes.
Money that could have paid for public infrastructure mostly made
its way into the pockets of politicians. The result was a capital city of
7 million people who suffered from power cuts, poor water supply
and a healthcare system in desperate straits.
And yet, Khartoum somehow functioned and, in magical moments,
thrived. Over two decades, bouts of economic pain caused by cor-
ruption and a lack of investment were exacerbated by sanctions.
But as the city swelled and stretched with the arrival of thousands
fleeing civil war and poverty in other parts of Sudan, a social contract
37
remained in place. When the state failed them, extended families
stepped in to support poorer relations, paying for their healthcare,
housing and education.
The affluent urban population of the city believed they were
immune from the strife tearing through the outer regions. Even
though Khartoum was periodically roiled by political turmoil and
economic crisis, the city never descended into violence. Political elites
imprisoned or exiled each other as governments changed hands, but
always ensured that Khartoum was safe for themselves. They saw
the importance of preserving Khartoum as a centre of commerce and
culture. We told ourselves we were fundamentally a peaceful people.
But on 15 April this year, as the RSF entered Khartoum with the
spoils of the city in their sights, it became clear that this peace had
always been secured at the expense of the rest of the country. It was
Sudan’s fourth war but it was Khartoum’s first.
FOR 50 YEARS, CONFLICT HAS RAGED ACROSS DIFFERENT REGIONS
of Sudan, but not a single shot has been fired in Khartoum. While rebels
battled, fighting never reached the central stronghold. For decades,
political and economic power was monopolised by a handful of tribes
settled along the Nile – a mix of the descendants of Arabs from the
Arabian peninsula in the 12th century, and Indigenous populations
from the Nile region. Throughout the 80s and 90s, refugees arrived
from the south, labouring in menial jobs and living in precarious
encampments and squats on the edges of the city. Otherwise, the
war in Sudan’s south was a distant noise. For a period in the early 90s,
after Bashir’s Islamist government came to power in a military coup
in 1989, Sudan’s longest war, which ultimately resulted in the
secession of South Sudan in 2011, was given a higher profile in 
Khartoum and rebranded as a holy jihad.
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
38 The tragedy of Khartoum
As that war ended in the early 2000s, another exploded in the west
of the country. Rebels from African tribes in Darfur, another vast,
marginalised region, took up arms against the central government and
demanded their share of resources. The government’s scorched-earth
response, according to global human rights organisations, amounted
to ethnic cleansing. In 2009, Bashir became the first sitting head of
state to be indicted by the international criminal court, when he was
charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The war in Darfur was even less of an event in Khartoum than the
civil war. I had graduated from university a short while before the
start of fighting in Darfur, and any information I learned about it was
from western media. Bashir spun it as a western campaign to isolate
his government for holding on to its Islamic principles and not doing
the west’s bidding, and Khartoum’s elites were happy to adopt that
narrative. The few times the war was mentioned in my immediate
circle, the view was that Darfur rebels were over-dramatising claims of
ethnic cleansing. A relative breezily once announced that people from
Darfur “weren’t Sudanese anyway”, whatever citizenship they held.
In the early 2000s, Sudan began exporting oil, and the wealth that
fight the rebels, or bombed targets from the air. Otherwise, it did not
get its hands dirty. Generals wore elaborate uniforms, never stained by
combat. The Officers’ Club in the centre of Khartoum was the largest
private club in the city, with manicured gardens, a swimming pool,
several banquet halls, a billiards room and a bowling alley. On New
Year’s Eve, there was often a large concert in the club’s amphitheatre.
The government handed over the business of quelling the rebellion
in Darfur to the Janjaweed, an informal force made up of nomadic Arab
tribes that for years had raided land and cattle from settled African
populations. Their modus operandi was kill the men, rape the women,
loot and burn their villages. In 2013, Bashir’s government had come
to depend so heavily on the Janjaweed that he regularised them into
a formal military unit, the Rapid Support Forces.
As the RSF entered Khartoum three months ago, people were
shocked at their violence, disdain for people’s homes and destruc-
tion of landmarks and infrastructure. Many people I spoke to from
Khartoum, notably from older generations, expressed bewilderment
at “where these people came from”, or had concluded they must
be foreign mercenaries.
it generated rendered Khartoum a capital of consumerism, leisure  Clockwise
and property, even more remote from the areas under attack in the from top left “WHEN WE CAME, WE FOUND THE PEOPLE in
west. People built larger houses, bought bigger cars and held extrava- smoke from Khartoum resting in luxury,” said one RSF soldier
gant weddings. I was always perplexed at how such lavish lifestyles a market in on a video recorded after the conflict started in
were funded, even by people in the civil service. I later realised they Omdurman; April. “Air conditioners cool the air. The fridge
were drawing on heavy subsidies provided by a government that had a window of a flat has water so cold it cools your heart. The cars are
created an extensive patronage system. in Khartoum; air-conditioned. People here don’t work very hard.
A thousand kilometres to the west, villages in Darfur were being protesters They come home two, three times a day. It’s not
razed. But not by the army, which was busily partaking in Sudan’s outside the like in the provinces, where you go and sit in the
boom years. Never far from power, the military had always operated army complex bush all day only to come home at night.
on a franchise basis. In Darfur, it appointed Arab mercenary gangs to in the capital “This rest that you are enjoying,” he said,

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023


The pressing question is: are the middle classes finally
paying for decades of privilege and protection?
addressing the people of Khartoum, “we want to rest like you.” The
intent was clear – the people of Khartoum did not deserve these
lives, so vastly different from theirs, and the time had come for us
to hand them over.
Once large parts of Khartoum and Omdurman were secured by the
RSF, its soldiers began entering houses. If the inhabitants were lucky,
they were ejected and told not to return. If they resisted, they were
killed. By mid-May, it was clear that Khartoum was, to the militia,
merely a large pot of loot, ripe for the taking.
An elderly uncle heard the RSF entering his home before he saw
them, as they smashed whatever was in their way and tore pictures
and mirrors from the walls. After he pleaded with them, the troops
warmed to him. He and his family were spared, but told they would
have to leave. “You seem like a good man,” they said to him, “but your
house is large and, even if we leave, there are others who have their
eyes on it.” My uncle and his family took whatever they could carry
while the soldiers kept their guns pointed at them. “Did you see what
happened?” my uncle asked me, with the same good humour with
which he had talked the RSF troops out of ransacking his home. “We
became homeless at the end of our lives,” he told me, with a laugh.
Reports of RSF troops stealing cars and looting houses started
coming in from all over the city. Incidents of rape were reported on
social media and came with requests for emergency contraceptive
pills. A graphic video was circulated, recorded by a witness who
narrated the time and location, showing an RSF solder raping a young
girl, as another stood guard.
Three months of fighting between the RSF and the army have
wrecked the city’s infrastructure, historical landmarks and cultural
institutions. A video showed Khartoum’s largest market on fire.
Another showed Airport Road, one of the city’s main thoroughfares,
deserted, strewn with the wreckage of burned cars. Khartoum’s fac-
tories were destroyed. The Sudan National Museum was taken over
by the RSF. An archeological lab that housed ancient mummified
remains was broken into by befuddled RSF soldiers, who filmed the
contents, including mummies.
“These are all just corpses,” one narrates, “boxed up in a way you
don’t understand.” Libraries and cultural centres were taken over
by RSF troops, who saw these places not as repositories of valuable
heritage, but the fripperies of a decadent city.
In early July, RSF troops broke into my family home. Witnesses
told us that militia men first entered on foot, then left, returning with
a truck that they loaded with my family’s possessions. Most of what
was in the house held sentimental rather than material value – family
pictures, books, old furniture, musical instruments and memorabilia
belonging to my late father, including an ancient shortwave radio
REUTERS; ALAMY/PA; OZAN KÖSE/AFP/GETTY
that was his constant companion, and the only printed copy of my
pre-digital age university graduation thesis.
These items will fetch little in a war economy, but they were
treasured memories and heirlooms. Their loss symbolises the demise
of a city that had itself, despite its contradictions and limitations,
been a vibrant place of dynamic student politics, academic excel-
lence, and musical and literary heritage. What the militiamen took
or vandalised are the hallmarks of a culture that was rich and deep-
rooted, and, yes, built on the privilege of class and tribe. As our own
home was taken over, that sense of erasure extended to my entire
life in Khartoum.
39
Y FAMILY ARE SHELTERING in a small
village east of Khartoum. Those of us out-
side Sudan plot, on a daily basis, to try
to get them out, but our attempts keep
failing due to unsafe routes and visa
restrictions. Other relatives have become
refugees in Egypt and Eritrea, a journey
that claimed the lives of three in-laws as
their bus overturned on a bumpy dirt road. One elderly diabetic uncle
remains in Khartoum, refusing to leave, even though he has run out
of insulin. Six weeks before the fighting started, we had all been in
Khartoum, celebrating a wedding. Now the older family members
are listless and quiet, only springing to life to recount the trials they
went through or to bring news of another calamity.
In this new bewildered state, the question – badly timed, but
pressing nonetheless – is, are Khartoum’s middle classes finally paying
for decades of privilege and protection? If you asked any of the people
who have been driven from their homes, their answer would be that
Bashir’s government, and the RSF, victimised the whole country.
The 30 years under Bashir visited misery upon millions, including
Khartoum’s middle classes. Throughout the 90s, Bashir’s regime
dissolved labour unions, purged the civil service and replaced those
fired with loyalists. Those who resisted, including two uncles of mine,
were thrown into secret prisons, infamously called “ghost houses”,
and tortured. A cousin of my father’s who participated in a counter-
coup early in Bashir’s rule was forced to dig his own grave and then
executed, along with 27 others. Officers present at the time said that
not all were dead when the firing squad began to fill the graves, and
the soil choked the voices of the not yet perished who pleaded for
instant death and not slow suffocation. “Just end us,” they pleaded.
Throughout the 90s, the population suffered under a repressive
sharia regime and harsh security state. Strict public order laws were
enforced by the police, who meted out lashings and head shavings
for inappropriate dress or partying. The University of Khartoum was
closed twice in 10 years, as students were lashed, imprisoned and
tortured for any political activity that was critical of the government.
When Khartoum did finally reject Bashir in 2019, it demanded that
the army return to barracks and the RSF be disbanded. Protesters
chanted: “We are all Darfur.” For two months, the main protest site
became a celebration of art, music, poetry and collectivism, but the
hope was smothered when the protests were brutally suppressed.
A bloody massacre on 3 June left more than 100 people dead.
The loss of our home, the scattering of my family, and their hunger
and dispossession cannot be mourned without acknowledging that
their fate is not the work of a unique and vengeful evil in the shape
of RSF fighters whose decision to take up arms, their resentment
and nihilism, were all forged in an economic wasteland where war
was the most reliable living. They also represent Khartoum’s legacy,
its failure to attend to social justice and equal distribution, and to
foresee the consequences of that failure. As we yearn to return, the
only hope for the city’s survival, and the safety of those who remain,
is the acceptance that it can never be as it was before. As Khartoum
burns, that tranquil childhood journey to visit my grandparents plays
over and over in my mind, as I try to capture the city in my memory
one last time, and bid it farewell •
NESRINE MALIK IS A GUARDIAN COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 The frying game
Will spiralling energy and food costs be the death of Britain’s f ish and chip shops?

BY TOM LAMONT PHOTOGRAPHS BY MURDO MACLEOD

O
NE SUMMER AGO, before the region’s fish and chip industry the same time the sun came up, feeding potatoes into the Popular’s
was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for rumbling peeler.
people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes These three businesses were run by men and women who had thick
of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This skins, literally so when it came to their fingertips, which had become
lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing so desensitised to heat that they could be brushed against boiling
lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make oil to better position a fillet of frying fish. But these people were not
deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody invulnerable to strain. By the following summer, two of the three
would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and businesses would be gone, forced to close against their owner’s will.
chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists I visited the East Neuk several times during that difficult year: in
come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around high tourist season, in the eerie quiet of winter, in the limbo between.
in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the Between July 2022 and July 2023, things got tougher and sadder in
East Neuk might be the best in Britain and because of that (it follows) the East Neuk than anybody predicted they would. By the time of
the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding my last visit, people were in mourning, having said goodbye to a
it harder and harder to balance their books. beloved local figure who had given their all to a cherished, suddenly
The driver of the tattie lorry, a red-cheeked Scotsman named endangered trade; and it was no longer so difficult to imagine a world
Richard Murray, carried keys for most of the shops on his route, to without fish and chips.
save waking any tired friers who’d been up late the night before, por-
ing anxiously over their sums. War in Ukraine coupled with ongoing THE ORIGIN QUESTION, wrote the historian John Walton in his
complications from Brexit had driven up prices of almost all the goods definitive history of the dish, “is a matter of murky and probably
that chip shops depend on, from fish to oil and salt to packaging. insoluble dispute”. Should Londoners take the most credit for its crea-
More distressing was the rising cost of energy. The great guzzling tion and proliferation, or Lancastrians? The textile towns around Man-
range cookers must be kept on all through the trading day. As the chester or the fishing ports of Scotland? Undoubtedly, fish and chips is
price of gas and electricity threatened to double, then triple, friers immigrant food, imported, perfected and perpetuated by refugees and
were opening their energy bills with gritted teeth. others from Portugal, Spain, eastern Europe, Italy,
A trade association called the National Federation Cyprus, Greece and China. The method of deep-
of Fish Friers said that as many as a third of the UK’s frying white fish in a thin batter made of flour and
10,500 shops might go dark. egg or milk was probably brought to London by Jews
It was about 8am when Murray drove his tattie in flight from Catholic inquisitors. Walton and other
lorry into a village called Pittenweem. He was met on food historians have identified chipped potatoes
the road by Alec Wyse, a skilled frier, 59 years old and “in the French style” being sold from carts in the
known as Eck, who ran the Pittenweem Fish Bar. The ‘If you’d kept industrial Pennines as early as the 1860s.
tiny shop had been bought by Wyse’s father using coming, even just Whether styled as chippy, chippie, chippery, chip-
money from the sale of a family fishing boat. There per, fishery, fish bar or fish restaurant, whether given
were nautical portraits on the walls. A peg-letter
once a fortnight, punning titles (the Haddock Paddock, the Plaice
menu listed eight unchanging menu items. Work- it might have to Be) or rootsier names that acknowledged their
ing together, Wyse and Murray unloaded sacks of been different’ founders (Jimmy’s, George’s, Low’s, Long’s), these
potatoes, carrying them inside on their shoulders. shops proliferated through the 20th century, from
A little way along the shore from Pittenweem, in the smarter Shetland to Cornwall. The fundamental cooking method is always
harbour town of Anstruther, Murray parked outside the Wee Chippy. the same. Fillets of white fish, usually haddock or cod, are battered
Founded by Ian Fleming, a 64-year-old seafood trader with a tattoo of before being dropped into 180C baths of oil. An experienced frier will
a shark on his forearm, the Wee Chippy stood across from a seaweed- tend their fillets using a metal strainer to baste them with twitches of
covered strip of beach and a cobbled jetty. Fleming later told me it the wrist. After about five minutes, the battered fish will be golden,
ruined his marriage, this fish and chip shop. “The hours,” he growled curved, firm enough to be set atop chips without losing its shape.
in explanation. Daily operations had long since passed to his busi- Chips are made from white potatoes, peeled and cut to the
ness partner, a chef in his 40s called Chris Lewis. But Fleming kept thickness of thumbs, placed in a steel basket and submerged in the
a close eye on the place. same hot oil until they will crack apart when squeezed. There is
Leaving Anstruther behind, the tattie round almost done, Murray resistance in Scotland towards the frying of cod, which is seen as an
swung inland, in the rough direction of Dundee and a fish and chip shop English lunacy, but it is generally accepted that potatoes grown in the
called the Popular. A family concern, the Popular was staffed six  days drier soil of England do better when fried, being lower in glucose and
a week by a man called Graham Forbes, his wife Angela, and their two less likely to caramelise. National pride stretches so far. Only
adult children. Though Forbes was in his mid-70s, he was the one not so far as brown chips. 
who rose early to let the tattie man in. He liked to get started at about Ideally, just after eating a portion of fish and chips, you

 Ready to wrap The cheap and cheerful takeaway treat is in danger of disappearing 28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
42 The frying game

should be aware that what you’ve put inside your body was prepared Graham said, “isn’t it?” They telephoned the Dundee newspaper
using ungodly quantities of grease, yet you don’t yourself feel greasy. again, which published a story confirming the Popular would close
This paradoxical richness, a lightness of touch, sets the better shops after 35 years. Graham’s daughter Gaynor put an announcement
apart. At the Golden Galleon in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, takeaways are online. The next day, “as soon as we opened the doors at 11.30am”,
lined up in paper pouches on the counter, the fish tumbled in with the Graham said, “we were mobbed. Generations of customers. Grand-
chips. At the Ashvale in Aberdeen, diners can order a “whale” portion, parents. Grandkids. People asked: ‘Why?’ I told them the enjoyment
so huge that anyone who finishes it unassisted wins a prize. Along had gone out of it, from worrying all the time. I told them, if you’d
a particular stretch of pavement in Holborn in London, pedestrians kept coming, even just once a fortnight, it might have been different.”
walk headlong into a bubble of airborne fat that seems to enclose a Before the main danger to fish and chip shops was the quarterly
shop called the Fryer’s Delight, where beef dripping, not vegetable energy bill, it was sudden fire. Ignored for a moment, hot cooking fat
oil, is used for frying, creating a flavour that is fattier, more unctuous. can get too hot, rising to an auto-ignition point and exploding. In a
Connor Booth oversees the weekly tattie runs through the East single year – 2018 – there were serious fires at Old Salty’s in Glasgow,
Neuk. He works for a Scottish company called John Callum Potatoes. the Admiral in Overseal, Mr Chips in Fakenham, the Pilton Fryer in
Booth explained that the top fish and chip shops are kept consistent Pilton, the Fish Bar in Fenham, Crossroads in Kingstanding, Graylings
by generations of rolling tradition. But the dawn in Fremington, the River Lane Fish Bar in Norfolk,
calls to prep ingredients, the midnight equipment- Bruno’s on Canvey Island, Jimmy’s Palace in Liver-
scrubbing, the reliance on inefficient cookers have pool, Scoffs in Paignton, and Moby Dick in Shirley.
made willing staff scarce and costs harder to bring “Doesn’t matter how experienced you are,” said
down. “Every industry has to adapt to survive,” said Chris Lewis, one of the owners of the Wee Chippy
Booth. “Unfortunately, in fish and chips, there’s
only so much you can do. The potatoes need their £15 in Anstruther, “if something mechanical goes, or
something catches, and you haven’t seen it – that’s
peeling. The fish needs its frying.” True cost of a fish it, that’s your time.”
supper as calculated by The Wee Chippy’s time came on Remembrance

A
S TRADING CONDITIONS WORSENED one proprietor; most Sunday in 2018, in the middle of a lunch service. A
last year, proprietors were giving inter- are wary of charging frier was distracted; the oil in the range ignited; a
views to local newspapers, explaining their customers huge ball of fire was sucked into the Wee Chippy’s
the pressures they were under. These more than £10 ventilator, leaving just enough time for staff and
communications tended to have the tone of pan- customers to flee before the ground floor was thick
icky messages scribbled by hostages. At the Crispy Cod in Worcester, with smoke. In the subsequent blaze, unpeeled potatoes from the
they said: “It feels like we have no control.” The Gipsy Lane Chippery tattie lorry blistered and shrunk in their sacks. About 100 North Sea
in Leicester: “It’s scary.” Paddy’s Plaice in Criccieth, in Wales: “Need haddocks cooked inside a fridge. Jars of pickled eggs boiled and burst.
help.” In the town of Macduff in Scotland, a shop called the Happy Lewis and Ian Fleming, who both live nearby, came running. They
Haddock received a bill that put up its energy costs from £600 ($770) watched from across the harbour road as the glass in the windows
a month to £2,000. The Happy Haddock closed. Roughly the same of their shop began to melt and pulsate. Jets of orange flame licked
thing happened at the Fryar Tuck in Belfast, then at Barnacle Bill’s out the chimney pots.
in Somerset, and Chip Ahoy on the Isle of Wight. At Chung’s Chinese Fleming (he of the shark tattoo) had opened this fish and chip
Chippy in Lancashire, a note appeared in the window, similar in shop in 1999, in perverse defiance of the fact that there was already
substance to messages at Stefano’s in Glasgow and Jones Plaice in Cal- a popular alternative, the Anstruther Fish Bar, just a short way along
dicot, Monmouthshire: “Due to excessive price increases in all areas, the harbour road. After the 2018 fire, Fleming’s insurance claim was
raw materials, labour, fuel and utilities, we have decided to close.” rejected. “We were classed as having a flammable material behind
From the Popular in Dundee, the Forbes family issued a plea on the plasterboard,” he told me. He talked it over with Lewis and they
Facebook: “Use us or lose us.” Graham Forbes’s son, Lindsay, had decided to spend their own money on a refurbishment, if only to
already given an interview to a Dundee newspaper that amounted give the insurance company as well as their rivals in Anstruther “a
to a forewarning of closure. A clipping of this article (“Chippers are kick in the nuts”, as Fleming put it. Between them, they spent nine
battered by soaring costs”) was pinned to the Popular’s fridge on the months and a six-figure sum getting the Wee Chippy back open for
summer day the family huddled to make a decision. “This is the end,” the summer of 2019.

THREE YEARS ON, CONDITIONS WERE TOUGHER than Fleming had

ever known them. As consumers battled rising costs of living at home,
they were eating out less. Because they had less custom, proprie-
tors were being forced to charge more, right when they could least
afford to discourage diners. There is a fish bar in Cardiff, John’s, that
shut in 2001 and has never been bought or altered since. A decaying
menu at John’s still advertises a takeaway portion of fish and chips
for the unthinkable price of £2.45. Two decades later, the same meal
cost £9.40 at the Wee Chippy. Few proprietors dare breach the holy
barrier of £10. The owners of a shop called Cafe Fish in Belfast did
some honest maths and concluded that, given prevailing costs, fish
and chips ought to cost about £15 per portion. “Who would pay it?”
Fleming wondered.
If motivation ever flagged at the Wee Chippy, Fleming and Lewis
only had to think of their rivals up the road. For decades, the Wee
Chippy had been engaged in a losing battle with the Anstruther Fish
Bar, which had achieved great fame since it opened in the 1980s, doing

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023  Shore thing The Wee Chippy in Anstruther
 43
 Fast food From preparation to plate in the Anstruther Fish Bar

fashioned way, wrapped in paper. Though the Pittenweem Fish Bar

wasn’t often included in tourist books or must-try lists, people in the
region knew how rare and special it was, an inexpensive gem that
seemed to stand outside of time.
When the Pittenweem Fish Bar burned down at the end of summer
2022, it was a trauma felt for miles. The fire started on a Tuesday after-
noon. Flames massed in the cramped interior of the shop, burning
up the net curtains, popping out windows, sending a shaft of dark
smoke over Pittenweem’s church and towards the sea. A neighbour
rushed in to drag out Wyse, who had been at the range and, according
to an eyewitness, was dazed by smoke. Fire engines were on the
scene for hours.

W
HEN RICHARD MURRAY DROVE THROUGH Pittenweem
again in October 2022, he slowed down his tattie lorry
to pass the ruined shop. He turned off his music. “Dev-
astating,” he muttered. Arriving in Anstruther soon
afterwards, Murray parked near the seaweed-covered beach as usual.
He fell into conversation with Fleming, who was waiting in the chill
outside the Wee Chippy, peering along the harbour road. “Town’s
quieting down,” Fleming observed. Murray nodded.
As they started to unload sacks of potatoes, the two men chatted
about the terrible frequency of fires in their industry. In former times,
Fleming said, you could try to rebuild. Even after the Wee Chippy was
denied its insurance payout, the market seemed stable enough to
make the risk of reinvestment worthwhile. Would it even be possible
to bring a burned fish and chip shop back now?
“That’s where you worry about Eck,” Murray said to Fleming.
“Aye,” growled Fleming.
“Seen him?”
Fleming shook his head. “I texted.”
A lot of people in the East Neuk had been sharing memories of the
Pittenweem shop, using Facebook forums to gather anecdotes and
photographs. Former employees spoke of after-school jobs peeling
or cleaning. Customers memorialised favourite orders. That autumn,
when I visited an East Neuk seafood business run by a family called
the Wilsons, the married owners reminisced about a courtship spent
eating unimprovable Pittenweem takeaways. People stood in queues
much to establish the East Neuk as an area of excellence for fish and so long, Wendy Wilson remembered, the line would snake away from
chips. Prince William was a customer there during his student days. the Wyses’ door, beyond the bank, wrapping around the church. Since
His stepmother, Camilla, later stopped a royal motorcade on the har- the fire, the village had lost something irreplaceable: a queue to join,
bour road and sent in a security guard for takeaways. The Anstruther an illuminated place to go after dark, a takeaway to eat on a sea wall.
Fish Bar had won every industry award going. It was celebrated in It is an article of faith that fish and chips tastes best eaten by the sea.
guidebooks and travel pieces. Sometimes, Fleming and Lewis watched I’ve agreed with this sentiment all my life, without wondering why,
through the windows of their shop as tourists parked on the terrace except to think that being near a shoreline must equate to freshness
outside, wandering along the harbour to eat at the Anstruther Fish of fish. When the Pittenweem Fish Bar opened in the 1980s, haddock
Bar, later compounding the insult by putting their scraped-clean was bought off the boats in Pittenweem harbour. Today, an auction
takeaway trays in the Wee Chippy’s bins. house in Peterhead on the north-east tip of Scotland
Over time, there had been squabbles between the is more or less all that’s left on one side of the coun-
two neighbouring businesses over property, park- try. Almost every haddock fried in the East Neuk has
ing, staffing, branding, packaging, naming rights, been trucked 160km south from Peterhead.
as well as dibs on who could sell which variety of Why, then, should fish and chips by the sea taste
savoury pudding. Such rivalries were quite common, special? In a place like this, I think it must be the
I learned. By now I’d spent enough time in the East continued intimacy between fish as a trade and fish
Neuk to notice that, whenever friers complained Fish and chips as a meal. As well as part-owning the Wee Chippy,
about each other, there was one family – the Wyses is a national Ian Fleming is a seafood trader. He is the son of a
of Pittenweem – they exempted from criticism. Eck seafood trader. Before he became a frier, Eck Wyse
Wyse and his relatives had run the Pittenweem Fish
pleasure we was a fisherman, the son of a fisherman. Down on
Bar since the 1980s, taking it over from the Baird expect to enjoy Pittenweem harbour, two bronze statues – a mother
family, before them the Smalls. This was a seriously time and again and a daughter – face the choppy water, memori-
adored village hub, one of the few places in Pitten- alising all the local people who have tried to make
weem that remained open after dark. The Wyses’ ancient cooker, a living from the sea, as well as the 400 or so who have died
wide as the room that contained it and submarine-like in appear- trying since the 1800s. Decades ago, Fleming’s father-in-law 
ance, turned out takeaways that were passed to customers the old drowned in a fishing accident. Many, many people in the East

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

44 The frying game

Neuk have lost a friend, an uncle, a cousin. Fishing is a serious matter
here. Fish and chips is a serious meal.
It was December 2022. The Pittenweem Fish Bar had burned down.
The Popular in Dundee was closed. The Wee Chippy clung on, though
tourists would not visit the East Neuk in any numbers again until the
spring. After about 5pm, the whole coast could seem abandoned,
just the tide audible in the dark as well as the grumble of salt lorries
gritting the roads in case of a freeze. When I visited Fleming at his
house on the outskirts of Anstruther, he opened his ledger to see how
many haddock they were getting through at the Wee Chippy in the
off season. Not so many, he frowned. “We’re telling ourselves that
business is down because of the frozen roads. That might be denial.”
London, where they would douse a takeaway with the leftover brine
from pickled gherkins. Later I went to university in Yorkshire. The taste
of sweet curry sauce over chips will forever turn me 18. My parents’
parents were from different backgrounds. Every spring, at Passover,
my maternal family would gather to eat fried fish from a London
takeaway. Every autumn, we would drive 800km north to visit my
paternal family in Aberdeen. My Jewish grandma and my Protestant
gran were very different people. Both put absolute trust in fried fish
as a food that would unite and enthuse a bunch of disparate relatives.
The same as hearing a Beatles tune, or rewatching The Snowman
at Christmas, or raising a pint of foaming beer, fish and chips is a
national pleasure we expect to enjoy time and again. Impossible to
imagine eating this meal for the last time. When Kong’s in Greater

I
N DUNDEE, THE FORBES FAMILY had emptied the Popular. Manchester announced it would close, like so many others, people
Lindsay Forbes accepted a job with a wholesaler. Graham and massed outside as if for a wake. There was a one-hour wait to get
Angela Forbes retired. The next time Graham walked by the inside, then a two-hour wait. In the queue, they joked about buy-
Popular, around Christmas, there was a “To Let” sign in the ing extra portions, to freeze and sell on to anybody suffering Kong’s
window. In Pittenweem, charred wood and plaster were heaped withdrawals. We don’t expect these takeaways to be taken away. We
outside the ruined fish bar. The scene appeared frozen in time since imagine dining-in in perpetuity.
the fire, even though months had passed. Murray Cameron, a mobile
frier who travelled around the East Neuk in his van, had never once I WAS BACK ON A TATTIE RUN through the East Neuk this month. The
encroached on Wyse’s territory. It was his tribute to Wyse, his show weekly delivery was no longer being driven by Richard Murray. It was
of confidence that one day the shop would reopen. no longer weekly. With fewer businesses to sell to, potato orders in the
Behind the scenes, as a member of the Wyse family later told a region were often so reduced that Murray’s boss, Conor Booth, could
local newspaper, Eck was taking the closure badly. handle a delivery using his pickup truck. Booth met
As weeks went by without the site being cleared, me in the truck and we thundered along the coast
Fleming worried more and more about his friend. road. It was raining, “a real dreich”, Booth said. As
Elsewhere, the Little Fryer in Southampton had to we went, he talked about potato prices, twice what
close. Unsustainable costs. The Dolphin in Belfast they were a year ago. There had been a weak seasonal
closed, as did the Seafarer in Northwich and the
High Plaice in Alston. The owners of Simpsons in 700 yield. It was unfortunate timing.
Booth had a one-month-old baby at home and he
Quedgeley felt they were busy, thriving even. But Estimated number was eager to finish the delivery run and get back. Par-
their energy bill had quadrupled, so it closed. Staff of fish and chip shops enthood had brought up a confusion of memories,
at the Whieldon Fish Bar in Stoke-on-Trent told their put up for sale he said, as well as premonitions about the future.
local newspaper they were clinging on by leaving because rising costs He had been remembering driving around with his
the lights off when they could. Simeone’s in Glas- made business grandad when he was small, hearing about vanished
gow was listed for sale, along with about 700 other unsustainable local businesses, some impossible for him to picture.
fish and chip shops including the Ocean King in That used to be a boot-maker, his grandad would
Gosport, the Haddock Paddock in Cumbria and Ightenhill Traditional say, pointing. That used to be a knife-sharpener. Booth wondered if
in Burnley. Smarts in Abingdon closed. he would drive a grandchild of his own along this coast; if he would
Fleming received a text message at the end of January 2023. Eck have to explain, there used to be these places we called fish bars.
had died that day. It was sudden. The police were not treating the It stopped raining. Booth let me out at Pittenweem cemetery. As
death as suspicious. The family put out a photograph, online, that the sky brightened overhead, the damp reddish gravel of the cem-
showed Eck behind the range at his old fish and chip shop. “Where etery paths started to dry, getting its crunch back. The night before
he was happiest,” they wrote, “where he belonged.” Wyse’s funeral in February, there had been a great spectacle in these
As a schoolboy I often bought lunch from Andrews in Enfield, north skies – an aurora that flared purple and green. The following morning,
there was another extraordinary sight in Pittenweem. The village was
full of people. Hundreds had turned out to say goodbye. The church
did not have enough pews. Mourners started to line the route to the
cemetery and later joined the funeral procession as it passed. Wyse
was buried next to his father, who had run the family shop before him.
After paying my respects, I walked along the coast to Anstruther. It
was teatime. The harbour was busy with boats. Riggings clacked and
hissed in the breeze. A dad on a bench fed his toddler, one scrap of
batter at a time. A middle-aged couple sat in their car. They had a tray
propped between them, two teas in china cups, cutlery from home,
and steaming takeaway boxes on their laps. About 6pm, I met Ian
Fleming outside the Wee Chippy. They had a good number of custom-
ers in the dining room. The shop was enjoying a bit of a summer-season
revival, Fleming said. They had recently won a Scottish catering
award, beating their rivals up the road for once. The Wee Chippy would
abide through another summer at least. We waited and got a table.
The waitress asked: “Do you want fish and chips?” •
TOM LAMONT IS A REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR TO THE GUARDIAN’S LONG READ

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023  Meals on wheels Murray Cameron trades from the back of his van
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

JOHN HARRIS
The Earth burns
and politicians
just squabble
Page 48 

CHINA
China’s growth is fading, as is its
dream of middle-class security
Rana Mitter
†
Illustration Dom McKenzie

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

46 Opinion
n the UK, prime minister Rishi Sunak
and Labour leader Keir Starmer are both
putting faith in five-point plans. Never
knowingly undersold, China’s government
announced last week that it’s going for a
31-point strategy.
Earlier this month, there were alarmed
faces in Beijing at the news that its GDP
had improved by 0.8% in the second quarter of 2023,
prompting a sense that China’s economy needs a rapid
boost. For the past few years, the private sector has been
a target for high-profile crackdowns by the Chinese
Communist party (CCP), worried that companies
such as Tencent and Alibaba were enjoying too high a
profile. Now, it says it wants to make the atmosphere for
entrepreneurs “bigger, better, and stronger”.
This feels urgent, because China’s economic recovery
seems to have stalled, and the CCP’s standing at home
still depends on Xi Jinping’s government creating a
“Chinese dream” of a middle-class lifestyle. The end of
Covid restrictions last December seemed to mark the
start of a powerful bounceback in consumption; travel
agencies were besieged by people booking holidays
they had been denied for nearly three years. But in
the past few months there have been more worrying
signs. Youth unemployment is growing: about one in
five of China’s 16- to 24-year-olds were unemployed in
June. Many graduates have had to take jobs as delivery
drivers because no professional jobs are available, and
social media is awash with images of hard-earned but
seemingly useless degree certificates.
In fact, there are plenty of jobs for those who want
them. China has a severe shortage of teachers in the
countryside, meaning that rural children tend to have
a patchy education. But few urban graduates want to
live in a village where running water is still a luxury, and
China’s strict “residence permit” (hukou) system means
young people who move to the countryside may never
be allowed back to the big city.
In a few years, China will face the opposite problem.
Thanks to three decades of the one-child policy, China’s
working age population will shrink from the 2030s.
Technology will need to adapt to create new jobs for a
smaller workforce, while providing enough growth to
pay for pensions and healthcare for the rapidly growing
elderly population.
could improve China’s situation. It spends 2.5% of GDP
on research and development, an investment that pays
off in areas such as its highly innovative technology
sector. It also has the second-largest single market after
India, and its population has a per capita average GDP of
$12,000, more than twice that of India.
But China is laying traps for itself. “Security” has
become the key political term: the word anquan has
the double meaning of “safety” in Chinese, giving it
a reassuring ring. Yet the term covers a wide range of
issues, not just traditional military or national security,
but economic and even cultural security. Press reports
about the huge debts of local governments have been
censored and journalists threatened with prosecution
for endangering financial stability.
Free flow of information is crucial to the modern
economy; in China, however, there is a danger that
economists and entrepreneurs alike will find it unwise to
state inconvenient truths. The fear of taking risks in case
of state retribution will exacerbate a tendency summed
up in a rhyme: Bu zuo, bu cuo (“If I do nothing, I won’t do
anything wrong”).
The wider political atmosphere is adding to a sense of
uncertainty. Another major story is the unexplained
disappearance of China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang,
who has not been seen in public since late June. Other
high-profile figures such as entrepreneur Jack Ma have
also disappeared in the past, only to reappear after being
publicly chastened for their political indiscretions,
but it’s unclear whether Qin is out of favour or just
indisposed. These vanishing acts add to the sense that
China’s political sphere is unpredictable and opaque,
sapping economic confidence at home and abroad.
Few if any businesses have agitated for democracy
in China, but plenty have begged for more transparency.
It’s no surprise that the 31-point plan includes
assurances (but not guarantees) that the rights and
interests of private entrepreneurs will be given due
care and attention.
There is one factor that would almost certainly bring
the economy to a halt: confrontation over Taiwan. Any
military confrontation in the region would crash supply
chains, lead investors to flee and result in huge mutual
sanctions between China and its western business
partners. Economic realities don’t
For years, there have been predictions that China  Rana Mitter rule out conflict. But a middle-class
will become the world’s largest economy. But the is a British Chinese professional wants financial
current crisis might make it seem as if decline is now historian and security, a cheaper mortgage, a secure
unavoidable. In fact, there are plenty of factors that political scientist pension and subsidised healthcare.
A nationalistic war that impacts their
lifestyle would be deeply unpopular.
In some ways, China’s inward turn is typical of the
wider world as a whole. Brexit Britain is unusual in
The Communist party’s seeking new markets abroad as the US, China and the
EU are all embracing protectionism. China’s assets
standing depends on Xi’s are real, including high levels of urban education and
an innovative private sector. But to thrive, it needs to
government creating prioritise openness and transparency at home and a
a ‘Chinese dream’ of peaceful and cooperative relationship with its overseas
trading partners. Without those factors, a 31-, 56- or
a middle-class lifestyle 93-point plan won’t be enough  Observer

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

 47

SPORT areas of ESG (environmental, social, governance) impact,

Major sporting events so sport needs to create ways to embed these beyond
PR and rhetoric. While recent hosting bids include
sections on sustainability and legacy, giving a nod to
are unsustainable. changing priorities, these have been add-ons rather than
the driving force of the bid. The game to win hosting
rights has been as much about pleasing the respective
A new model is needed awarding international bodies as providing what the
citizens of the host city need. This clearly has to change.

Cath Bishop Questions of social value force us to ask: who benefits

from hosting these events? A litany of stories of negative
experiences of local residents from Montreal to Rio de
Janeiro has shown how much of an afterthought this
has been. How far the London 2012 Olympics actually
brought positive regeneration to east London remains
hotly debated more than a decade later. Qatar brought
a whole new level of human cost with the atrocious
conditions for the construction workers leading up to
the World Cup. But it’s harder to cover up these human
costs now and western audiences are using their voices
to reject being part of this.
Added to this, large-scale negative environmental
impacts from sport question the very future of
international sporting events. More and more athletes
want to decrease how much they
he decision by the Australian state
of Victoria to pull out of hosting the
Commonwealth Games issues a
broader challenge to sports leaders,
governments, athletes and citizens
around the world. This crisis goes
beyond the growing indifference to
the purpose of the event, originally
founded as the Empire Games in 1930. The Olympics
faces a similar struggle with only two bids for the 2024
Summer Games, with Paris and Los Angeles awarded
2024 and 2028 respectively, and Brisbane being the only
city bidding for 2032.
In the race for the 2022 Winter Olympics, at least five
potential host cities, all western democracies, withdrew
from the bidding process after voter referendums or
public polling indicated a lack of local support, leaving
only Beijing and Almaty in the running. The old model
for hosting big events is broken and a new one is needed.
The costs of the original model are simply too high.
This isn’t just about the financial costs alone any more,
despite the Victoria government’s rationale and the
consistently woeful history of budget overruns and poor
budget management of sporting events for decades. We
are aware of other costs that matter, barely visible when
these sports events were first set up.
Financial costs can no longer be calculated in isolation
without reckoning the social value, environmental
impact and governance of these events. Just as
businesses justify and measure their performance in the
Illustration Nathalie Lees
 Cath Bishop is travel, as unease grows about the
a leadership and ethics of the environmental footprint
culture coach, left by sport. There needs to be
an Olympian a serious forum for this debate to
and author connect athletes, governments and
citizens to find better solutions.
The fact that citizens are speaking up could be
a positive. People care about sport, it has always had
the power to engage individuals and communities and
create powerful moments of change. Recently in Boston
and Vancouver, citizens demanded or voted that their
governments pull out of the race to host the Olympics.
Although this sounds a death knell to the existing
approach, it could also signal an opportunity and desire
to do things differently.
What would a bid look like if local citizens were part
of it (not just part of a glitzy parade or token aspect),
if they got to determine how it could support their
communities? What if they were part of decision-making
from the start?
On the field of play, the Commonwealth Games is
the only major international competition that features
athletes with a disability alongside able-bodied athletes.
This has been a way in which it has sought to change the
values and what the Games represents to offer more to
those watching, taking part and hosting.
There’s no doubt that the Commonwealth Games
remain deeply important to athletes who compete. Many
are feeling disappointed reading the decision taken by
Victoria’s leaders. Athletes with all their aspirations need
to be part of discussions.
Citizens also need to be involved from the start,
designing how any sports event complements and fits
in with their economic, social and environmental vision
for their city or state. We shouldn’t ask citizens simply to
“back the bid” but to join in and “build the bid” •
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
UNITED
KINGDOM On both left and right,
British climate politics
are increasingly shoddy
John Harris
ne news story defines this summer:
the fact that average global
temperatures have reached record-
breaking levels. Baking European
weather is seared into our
consciousness; as wildfires spread
across the Greek island of Rhodes,
thousands have been evacuated. In
the US, China and no end of countries besides, the idea
of planetary heating as a looming threat whose worst
effects might yet be averted feels like it is turning to ash.
In the UK, unfortunately, there was, last week,
a political story whose parochialist absurdity is off the
scale: Conservative voices undermining the fragile
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
cross-party consensus on reaching net zero by 2050
and calling for many of the UK’s tilts at climate action
to be slowed or stopped. The reason? The results of
three parliamentary byelections – and, in particular,
the views of 13,965 Conservative voters in the outer
London suburbs.
According to some Tories, last Thursday’s defeats
in North Yorkshire and Somerset highlight the public’s
exasperation with Rishi Sunak’s government, which is
inseparable from the impossible cost of living. But the
Conservatives managed a wafer-thin win in Uxbridge
and South Ruislip by mobilising opposition to the
expansion of the capital’s ultra-low emission zone
(Ulez) and its levy on older cars – and here, we are told,
lies a route to the party’s revival: abandoning such Tory
policies as phasing out new petrol and diesel vehicles by
2030, and relentlessly attacking Labour’s increasingly
embattled range of green proposals, centred on its
£28bn-a-year ($36bn) climate investment pledge.
The former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg
says that “high-cost green policies are not popular”.
Taking aim at supposed climate-related “costs, charges
[and] taxes”, the chair of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of
Conservative MPs, Craig Mackinlay, insists that “there’s
a lot to learn from Uxbridge – that a way to create some
significant blue water between us and Labour is to
Illustration Bill Bragg
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

rethink these charges and the net zero pathway” (note

the disingenuousness of these messages: the Tory ban on
onshore wind actually costs UK households £180 a year).
The west has been quick to
The biggest intervention so far has come from
the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, who used
an interview with the Sunday Telegraph to lay out
forgive the Saudi prince –
his opinions, advising against “treating the cause of
the environment as a religious crusade”, warning of
a backlash from the public and suggesting what he calls
it could prove shortsighted

W
a more “thoughtful environmentalism”. hen Jeremy
Among Tories on the hard right, hostility to climate Hunt was UK
action is a big part of what they have imbibed from foreign secretary,
Donald Trump and his populist fellow travellers in he echoed the
Europe. Rejecting big moves on carbon emissions widely voiced horror at the
also speaks to a certain kind of Tory’s devout belief in murder of the Saudi dissident
laissez-faire economics. Last week the energy secretary, and journalist Jamal Khashoggi
Grant Shapps, wrote to Keir Starmer demanding that in Turkey. He said that Britain’s
Labour pay for damage caused to his department’s response would depend upon
building by climate activists, because it is nothing less “confidence that such an
than “the political wing of Just Stop Oil”. appalling episode cannot – and
will not – be repeated”.
There are two big reasons why all this is so dangerous. Five years on, the UK has
First, even if the Tories lose power next year, there is invited Saudi Arabia’s crown
a realistic chance of their return to government circa prince and de facto leader,
2029 – possibly under the leadership of Suella Braverman Mohammed bin Salman, whom
or Kemi Badenoch, who have both expressed sceptical the CIA believe approved the
opinions about net zero. And that possibility highlights murder despite his denials, for
that unless the necessity of meaningful climate action an official visit later this year.
is understood on both the right and left, the sense of His rehabilitation was already
deepening disaster will only worsen. under way when Joe Biden
There are modest flickers of hope. Tory supporters fistbumped him a year ago,
of climate action may put too much and Britain, which has profited
is reconfiguring international
relations. The west wants
to limit cooperation with
Russia and knows that Riyadh
is looking to China to “de-
Americanise” its future.
Washington and London
have long regarded Riyadh
as a guarantor of regional
stability. Yet the crown prince
charged recklessly into Yemen
and co-led the blockade of
Qatar. He has now vowed to
take on his former mentor,
Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed
Al Nahyan, the president of
the United Arab Emirates, in
a breach reflecting competing
geopolitical interests,
economic rivalry and, it seems,
jostling egos.
That’s frustrating the US,
which sought to mend bridges
 John Harris faith in markets, but the way that richly from Saudi arms sales, with the crown prince last
is a Guardian they counterbalance the anti-net zero is hungrier than ever for trade year in a vain hunt for cheaper
columnist crowd is undeniable. The membership and investment. energy. Shortly after Mr
of the Conservative Environmental Riyadh has spent heavily Biden met him, Opec slashed
Network, which supports “net zero, nature restoration on influence operations oil production instead of
and resource security”, includes 150 peers and MPs. and brand management, boosting it – ensuring prices
Even if his actions barely matched his words, Boris investing in sportswashing stayed high in the run-up to
Johnson made a lot of noise about the climate: styling and entertainment. It has the US midterms. The UAE
himself as a Tory leader in tune with modernity. Such apparently used the US has reportedly blamed the
senior(ish) Conservatives as the former minister Chris messaging app Snapchat to Saudis for that decision,
Skidmore and Alok Sharma, the chair of the Cop26 burnish the future king’s image which underscored the
summit, share that belief, but have a much more sincere while imposing draconian shortsightedness of reliance on
and serious approach. The gravity of the situation sentences on influencers who Riyadh and its fossil fuels.
demands one of them stand in the next Tory leadership use social media to post any Some analysts have
election, and make their points loud and clear. criticism of the future king, suggested that Prince
If they don’t, their party’s tendency to ignore the including a Leeds PhD student, Mohammed has learned
imperatives of a burning planet will only worsen. In the Salma al-Shehab. The rate of his lesson in the light of the
wake of the Uxbridge byelection result, for example, executions has almost doubled international backlash over
Starmer claimed that “in an election, policy matters. under Prince Mohammed. Mr Khashoggi’s murder, and
And we’re doing something very wrong if policies put On the diplomatic front, is pursuing a more moderate
forward by the Labour party end up on each and every the kingdom is attempting to path. He may be showing
Tory leaflet.” Beyond Ulez, there is a bigger context: the exit the war in Yemen, where somewhat more discretion.
fact that the Labour leadership has already postponed its intervention has cost But the logical conclusion for
and diluted its green platform, and there are clearly so many civilian lives, and him to draw would surely be
people around Starmer who want rid of any emphasis on has improved rock-bottom that sufficient oil and money
climate action, for fear of the exact attacks that Tories are relations with Iran. The biggest bring forgiveness. Does
now suggesting. Therein lies the increasing awfulness of factor in its rehabilitation, condemnation followed swiftly
the UK’s climate politics, but any solution needs action however, has been Russia’s by a reprieve really chasten
from both sides – which means that Conservatives with invasion of Ukraine, which anyone? Or does it embolden
a conscience will have to find their voice, and fast  sent energy prices soaring and them instead? 

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters

WRITE Social media must change
TO US or face the consequences
Devi Sridhar is correct in
her assessment: social
media apps are indeed
Letters for addictive and dangerous
publication (Opinion, 14 July).
weekly.letters@ They waste people’s
theguardian.com time, they damage eyes
—
and, as so eloquently
Please include a
underlined, they seriously
full postal address
and a reference
damage the mental health,
to the article. and the self-esteem, of
We may edit letters. a significant number of
Submission and their users.
publication of all Body image, wealth,
letters is subject appearance, popularity
to our terms and and lifestyle are
conditions, see: constantly being thrust
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
into the faces of social
media members, creating
anxiety, confusion and
Editorial
melancholic feelings of
Editor: Graham
Snowdon inadequacy. Regulation
Guardian Weekly, is needed. Yes, it will
Kings Place, affect the super-rich
90 York Way, finances of some of these
London N1 9GU, enormously bloated
UK corporations. Well, so be
it! The regulation should
To contact the be more radical and
editor directly: all-encompassing than
editorial.feedback
it has, thus far, been. Put
@theguardian.com
simply, the social media
Corrections platforms must change
Our policy is to the way they function, or
correct significant face crippling fines and
errors as soon as further obstacles.
possible. Please Sebastian Monblat
write to guardian. Surbiton, England, UK
readers@
theguardian.com The ballot box is the only
or the readers’
tool to effect real change
editor, Kings Place,
George Monbiot’s article
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
(Our food systems are
UK close to collapse – and the
rich don’t care, Opinion,
21 July) should be read
as a survival guide for
humanity. The ever-
increasing signs of climate
collapse make for heart-
thumping reading, while
our daily dose of record-
breaking temperatures,
severe water shortages
and crop failure only
add to the litany of
looming disaster. Yet we
continue with the model
of “business as usual”
because those in whom
power and money are
entrenched wish to keep
them so.
So, what can the
majority of us, who
continue to bear the brunt,
actually do? Protest just
invites a prison sentence,
while getting the media
to invest a few words in
the subject is seemingly
impossible. Our most
effective, and indeed
possibly our only, tool
for effecting meaningful
change is our freedom to
vote – all the way from
local authority to national
government – but with
time fast running out
we need those in power
to be making those
changes without further
prevarication. Wherever
you are, please use your
vote wisely, because all
our futures may hang on
this tenuous thread.
Nick MacIneskar
Tayvallich, Scotland, UK
We are still suffering the
Johnson Brexit nightmare
Ron Willis (Letters, 7 July)
writes that “UK voters
will for ever be grateful to
Boris Johnson for ending
their Brexit nightmare”.
That may be the view
from Australia, but,
living here in Scotland,
I can assure Ron that the
Brexit nightmare has
not ended. Johnson was
not only instrumental
in creating the Brexit
nightmare, but his
agreement with the EU is
ensuring that UK voters
will continue to suffer the
Brexit nightmare for many
years to come.
Peter Edwards
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The destruction of the
NHS is sad for civilisation
The continued
discussion of the NHS
in the Guardian Weekly
letters page reminded
me of the comment in
Fintan O’Toole’s book
about Brexit, Heroic
Failure: “one of the
great achievements of
civilisation, the National
Health Service” How sad.
Its destruction surpasses
that of any historical
monument or institution
especially in its value
to the less privileged
in society.
David Blest
Dilston, Tasmania,
Australia
Unanswered questions
linger over AI’s future
While it is a good idea
to keep an eye on
developments in the field
of AI (Feature, 14 July),
there are even more
important questions
raised by it. These are:
who owns or will own
the intellectual property
concerned; and what will
they do with it?
The last time we were
confronted with such
questions at the end of
the 18th century with
the introduction of mass
industrial production,
the social consequences
were horrendous; we
are still working our way
through some of them in
our post-imperial world.
Come home the Luddites –
all is forgiven.
Tony Simpson
Wellington, New Zealand
COR R ECTIONS
An article stated junior
doctors were to be
offered a 6% pay rise (UK
report, 21 July). When an
additional consolidated
£1,250 payment is taken
into account, this equates
to an average rise of 8.8%.
The World Health
Organization recommends
a minimum 50-100 litres
of water a day to ensure
a person’s basic needs
are met (although it says
some people may require
more according to their
circumstances), rather
than 100 litres (How Israel
uses water to control West
Bank, Spotlight, 26 May).
The US climate envoy is
John Kerry, not John Kelly
(Global report, 21 July).

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

EXHIBITION
Disney’s magic
kingdom hides
its dark side
Page 55 

From nights at the

opera to Ukraine’s
best-loved rock stars,
music is playing a vital
role in opposing the
Russian invasion,
with many musicians
actually taking up arms

The sound of resistance

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Music
By Ed Vulliamy EN ARRIVE ON CRUTCHES,
two in wheelchairs, through a
wintry dusk at the monumen-
tal neo-Renaissance opera
house in Lviv. About 100 seats
tonight have been reserved for
serving soldiers, who enter the
lobby – a  fin-de-siècle wonder
– in military fatigues. The coat check looks like a barracks
locker room after they visit. A contingent of 40 cadets from
the city’s emergency firefighting department duly arrives,
disarmingly young. For most, it’s a first night at the opera.
The occasion marks the anniversary of Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine – a concert dedicated to the troops who have
fallen during this first, monstrous year of war, and the
innocent civilian lives lost. But also to “The Invincible”:
a homage in music to Ukraine’s noble cause and just war.
The programme is Bucha. Lacrimosa by Victoria Polevá,
composed in commemoration of the victims of atrocities
in that town during the early weeks of the war, followed
by Giuseppe Verdi’s epic Messa da Requiem. The stage is
blackened and, on each flank, red roses are arranged so that
petals fall towards the ground.
Before the curtain, an announcement: “In the event of an
air raid or siren, we ask you to adjourn to the shelter. If the
air-raid warning lasts less than an hour, the performance
will resume.” Orchestra and choir take their places, followed
by Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, the
creator of the international Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra.
 Previous page Bucha. Lacrimosa opens with hushed percussion, joined
Battle bars by solo violin – desolate and sparse throughout. Verdi’s
Andriy Khlyvnyuk Requiem is shattering for the usual reasons.
on stage with The young fighters and firefighters are enthralled. Dur-
BoomBox in Paris ing the day, through the doors of the nearby former Jesuit
last November, – now Greco-Catholic – church where military funerals
as part of their are held, coffins were carried in by their comrades, for
European benediction, then back down the steps, accompanied by
fundraising tour a dirge from a military band and followed by young wid-
STANISLAW GURENKO ows and scores of other mourners in tears. The same had
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
happened the day before, and would happen the day after.
Now, Verdi’s unforgiving Dies Irae erupts; mezzo-soprano
Anastasiia Polishchuk’s delivery pierces the air, and with
it her audience’s collective heart.
ANDRIY KHLYVNYUK AND HIS GROUP TAKE A BREAK.
This is not the band with which he plays as Ukraine’s most
famous rock star, but a unit of fighters from the frontline.
Khlyvnyuk is the songwriter and vocalist for BoomBox,
Ukraine’s best-known band over the past two decades, and
he recorded with Pink Floyd, in April 2022, a searing rendi-
tion of Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow. The words
were written in 1875, the present tune during the first world
war. It goes: “In the meadow a red viburnum bends down
low / Our glorious Ukraine is troubled so / We’ll take that
red viburnum and will raise it up / And our glorious Ukraine
shall, hey, hey, rise up …” Khlyvnyuk recorded the vocal
track in Kyiv, for David Gilmour and Nick Mason to accom-
pany from London, under the title Hey Hey Rise Up.
“This is my other band,” Khlyvnyuk beams this evening,
waving an arm around the company at the bar, enjoying
beers in Kyiv, grateful for the intermittent electricity. Almost
immediately after the Russian invasion, Khlyvnyuk joined
the volunteer unit of the patrol police, TOR, or tactical reac-
tion operations. Khlyvnyuk proudly shows a video of his
patrol crew in combat fatigues, deploying a Punisher drone
to unleash a bomb on a Russian tank. “I call it a Ukrainian
parking ticket,” Khlyvnyuk laughs. “Your vehicle is illegally
parked in our country!”
The world has been stunned by the courage and efficacy
of Ukraine’s resistance fighters. But few are professional
soldiers: most are yesterday’s taxi drivers, plumbers, com-
puter programmers – and musicians. Overnight, they have
become perhaps the most formidable fighting force in the
world. Andriy Khlyvnyuk is one of them.
In Kyiv, Khlyvnyuk has to stop every few metres to pose
for pictures; it takes us 20 minutes to get through a street
market on a day when seven missiles hit the capital city.
“Eighty per cent of our sales were in post-Soviet Russia,”

Khlyvnyuk tells me. “These people bombing Kyiv today
danced with their fiancees to my songs at their school gradu-
ations and weddings. These same men are now here trying
to kill us, and I am trying to kill them.”
I ask Khlyvnyuk: was it hard to shift from being the
country’s most famous rock star to a soldier under orders?
“I was afraid of the brutality, noise and dirt of war,” he says.
“But it wasn’t – it was surprisingly easy.” Why? “Look, if
I was sent somewhere to fight, I’d be useless, terrified; I
don’t want to kill or be killed. But that’s not what happened.
They came for our streets and our children’s playgrounds.”
Khlyvnyuk explains why he joined the TOR. “Music is a
universal language. But music also comes from where you
come from; it reflects the feeling of home, and what home
means – and on the obligation to protect your family, your
neighbour ... You have two options: run, or fight back.”
“War doesn’t accept all music,” Khlyvnyuk tells me. “It’s
interesting to see why a certain song works in wartime, and
another doesn’t. My hunch is that war needs love songs
more than socially meaningful songs. I know guys going
into battle loaded with weapons, tattoos up their necks,
hardcore – but they’re not singing [Black Sabbath’s] War
Pigs, they’re singing something pop ... or perhaps a Beatles
song just for the melody – a love song to make them smile!”
Playing during the war is different, too, he says. “It’s not
a commercial act any more … Now, it has to be a communal
thing, playing to people who have an extra reason to be
Ukrainian together – a meeting of people with a common
pain, people who’ve been to hell and back.”
UKRAINE’S SECOND CITY OF KHARKIV is subject to
unforgiving bombardment. During the late afternoons of
winter the city plunges into a silent darkness even when
there is electricity – this is done out of necessity, for the
nocturnal cover. As night falls, the deep boom of explosions
seems to ebb and flow – far away but audible, now horribly
and loudly closer, then further away again.
The next day there’s a sudden burst of song across a
shopping arcade on the city’s outskirts.
53
This is one in a series of pop-up recitals by soloists  From left
and musicians from the Kharkiv State Academic Opera Works of art
and Ballet, now rebranded Skhid Opera – skhid meaning The opera
east. It’s a lovely folk song, accompanied on violin by Vera Strashna Pomsta;
Lytovchenko, with blue and yellow ribbons on her instru- a mural by Banksy
ment. The company performs similar concerts in hospitals, in Borodyanka;
schools, metro stations and military installations. Shoppers backstage before
rest their bags, children pause from chatter, teenagers park a performance of
their phones, and everyone listens. “It’s more real than Natalka Poltavka;
playing in the opera house,” says Lytovchenko, “almost Vera Lytochenko
too real. This is the most important time of our lives, and KRAS YEVHENIY;
JOSE HERNANDEZ/
these are the most important performances we’ll ever play. REX/ SHUTTERSTOCK;
It’s unlike anything we ever did before the war ... It’s a way ROMAN PILIPEY/GETTY;
VERA LYTOCHENKO/AP
of saying: we’re not afraid.”
This afternoon’s programme is almost entirely Ukrainian
traditional songs and arias from operas by Mykola Lysenko,
the late-19th-century composer. Singing baritone is the
opera company’s artistic director, Oleksiy Duginov, who
tells me this period has brought about “a complete reas-
sessment of values, a whole new understanding of what
it means to be Ukrainian – and we hope that music will
be part of that”.
Igor Tuluzov, the chief executive of the opera house,
watches and listens with a smile. “Since the beginning of
the war, we’ve had trouble with the building itself – the
roof was torn off by a missile,” he says. “I hope one day
at least part of the Russian canon will return to Kharkiv,
but for now we have resolved not to play any pieces by These
Russian composers.” people
The opera house’s resolution reflects what is happening
in the wider cultural landscape: across the country, statues
danced to
of Alexander Pushkin as well as those of Catherine the Great my songs.
are being felled; streets formerly dedicated to Leo Tolstoy or Now they
Mikhail Bulgakov have been renamed. Effectively: the purge
of Russian culture from Ukraine – which poses a language try to kill
problem in Kharkiv, where Russian is the predominant us, and I’m
tongue. “It’s about spirit and mindset, who and what we
are,” says Tuluzov. “The division is between European 
trying to
democratic values and Russian imperial values.” kill them
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
54 Culture
Music
Nevertheless, the assertion of the Ukrainian language –
and its precedence over Russian – is essential to the forging
of what Ukrainians call “the political nation”. Born Russian
speakers – especially young ones – are learning and turning
to Ukrainian. Here in Kharkiv, the most interesting local folk
band, Morj (Ukrainian for walrus, inspired by the Beatles
song), have abandoned all their Russian lyrics and now
sing only in Ukrainian.
The week after the anniversary of the invasion, Kyiv’s
national opera gave a new production of Natalka Poltavka
by Lysenko. The story is about power and love in a peasant
village but at the time of its premiere in 1889 it was also
a snipe at the Russian empire – pointed towards imperial
Romanov Moscow in the same comic-but-serious way that
Smetana’s The Bartered Bride took aim at Habsburg Vienna.
Natalka Poltavka was sanctioned by Russian officials, and
Lysenko was later jailed in 1907 for supporting the 1905
uprisings against tsarist authority.
Crowds arrive for a matinee performance; the young
woman in the seat behind me is here for the first time.
“Despite the war?” I ask. “Because of the war,” she replies,
“because we don’t know what will happen next.” My guest is
Iaroslava Strikha, a literary critic and translator into Ukrain-
ian of western European and American literature. She calls
the opera “peasant kitsch – something important to Ukrain-
ian identity.” Natalka Poltavka is opera buffa, “but also a slur
against the old imperial order, and so a nourishment of our
national identity. It’s funny, but it isn’t. If you see it through
the eyes of the empire that oppresses us, it’s not kitsch, it’s
serious, even dangerous.”
Meanwhile, back in western Ukraine, at the opera house
in Lviv, Olha Lozynska, who directs the building’s glorious
Mirror Hall for choral and chamber music, recalls a perfor-
mance of Lysenko’s music on the night they reopened after
the invasion. “It was the Orthodox feast of the Annuncia-
tion. We played settings by Lysenko of Taras Shevchenko
[the famous poet of Ukraine’s 19th-century Romantic
nationalist revival], and our audience was completely dif-
ferent from before the war. Before, when we played the
mainstream repertoire, 70% of those present were tourists;
for national music, the hall was more than half empty. But
for this, we were sold out to an entirely Ukrainian audience.
And I understood that night the extent to which music is
part of this moment. No empty seats – not that night, and
never since.”
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
RANKFURT, GERMANY, LATE NOVEMBER
2022. Khlyvnyuk and BoomBox emerge
I accepted from a hotel on the outskirts, looking
for dinner on the eve of their concert
I might not at a rock venue of note, Batschkapp.
see my BoomBox’s tour of Germany, France and
the Netherlands is their most ambitious
home since the war began.
again BoomBox on tour consists of 12 people: six on stage, six
but, when “behind the scenes”, Khlyvnyuk tells me. One of these is
a comrade from the police unit, Stanislav Gurenko, “rifle-
I hear this man, and also director of music videos”, shooting not with
band, I’m a gun at this point, but a camera.
The green room is modest, with trays of avocado, char-
not so sure cuterie and cheese, and a fridge of mineral water and beer.
The band is quiet and focused. Khlyvnyuk introduces Inna
Nevoit, who plays bass, “Someone saw her cleaning and
catering in a metro bomb shelter and said: ‘Hey, Andriy –
isn’t that your bass player?’ She was serving borscht, and
I thought: ‘Inna, don’t ruin your hands, they’re golden.’”
Down the metal steps and out into another world, the
waiting crowd is pressed against security barriers strewn
with Ukrainian flags, and the air is thick with anticipation.
Up come the lights, and on come Khlyvnyuk and the band
to a jubilant greeting. “Good evening! We are from Ukraine!”
So are most people in the house, and in this heightened
atmosphere BoomBox could get away with a decent per-
formance, and still send their audience home happy. But
they give it their all and more.
The audience speaks for itself. Anhelina Chumak and
her 12-year-old daughter, Yeva, fled their home in Zarozhne
▼ Combat rock
in late February; her husband, Danyil, remains, fighting.
Members of the “We’re now far away, in a strange place,” says Anhelina,
band Antytila
“wondering whether we will ever be home again. But I
(below right) are saw BoomBox a few times, and when they play now, it’s
also members
like we’re all together again.” Volodymir Pavlenko arrived
of the Ukrainian in Frankfurt from still-occupied Melitopol, via Lviv, this
territorial
past March. “I had come to accept that I might never see
defence forces;
my home again,” he says. “Tonight, I’m not so sure – when
lead singer Taras I hear this band, anything feels possible.”
Topolia performs
Everyone is blown away by the climax of the evening:
with Bono of U2 Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow. It begins as incan-
(below left)
tation, a cappella, the audience clapping and swaying in
NUNO VEIGA/EPA; SERGEI
time: “And our glorious Ukraine shall, hey, hey, rise up …”
SUPINSKY/AFP/GETTY The instruments join, building the song to rock-symphonic
proportions. Girls mount their boyfriends’ shoulders and
wave the flag aloft; children, teenagers and adults alike
wear hard-won, bright, proud smiles.
Afterwards, Andriy reflects on the evening. “Tonight was
the most charged so far,” he says. “At least 80% of that audi-
ence were recent refugees. They might have had tickets for
the spring 2022 stadium show in Kyiv that never happened.
And here we are in Frankfurt. But they pour out so much
energy and love, it’s almost embarrassing, in a good way.
“I have to look into their eyes, but if I think about the
importance of what’s going on, I wouldn’t be able to sing.
Still, we have to do our job.” I suggest that they do it very well.
“So we should; if we’re not good after 20 years, we never
will be. But it’s never good enough, because we – the band
– are not the important part of this now. They are.” Observer
ED VULLIAMY HAS WRITTEN EXTENSIVELY FOR THE
GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER
This is an edited version of an essay in Granta 164:
Last Notes
 Culture
Exhibition
Taking the Mickey
H
ow do you celebrate the centenary of
Walt Disney is celebrating the second-biggest media company
its centenary year with on the planet? This October marks
a touring spectacle – but 100 years since Walt Disney founded
his eponymous film studio and began produc-
visitors won’t learn much ing silent shorts known as the Alice Comedies.
about the darker side Though the mouse who needs no introduction
was not created until 1928, Disney is capitalising
of the company’s past on the anniversary of the far less recognisable
Alice with a concert, a merchandise collection
By Amelia Tait and a “multi-sensory friendship experience” for
over-18s. The jewel in Prince Charming’s crown,
however, is a touring exhibition.
Disney100: The Exhibition is made up of
10 galleries, organised not chronologically but
thematically: in one you can learn about music,
and another is all about theme parks. Guests can
see hundreds of props and costumes as well as
play with interactive installations – press this
button to hear Moana sing in Hebrew! Pull this
lever to play a different underwater Disney scene!
How exactly do you summarise everything the
▲ Star dust
Fairy good company has done in a century? When Disney Is it right for the exhibition to shy away from
Visitors are Hundreds of archivist Becky Cline began working on the exhi-
greeted by props and bition five years ago, she knew exactly where to
a virtual Walt costumes occupy start: resurrecting Walt.
at Disney100 10 galleries “I always had this dream of having Walt Disney
DISNEY DISNEY host the exhibition,” says Cline, who has worked
55
for Disney for 34 years. Keen to have Walt himself
greet punters and undeterred by him having died
56 years ago, Cline worked with visual effects
company Industrial Light & Magic to create
“something that had not been done before”:
Disney MagicStage.
Half-hologram, half a strange sort of layered
cinema screen, 3D Walt appears lifesize in a cloud
of fairy dust. Regrettably, the “ooh” factor is
missing as Walt tells visitors: “There’s a lot of
satisfaction in developing ideas into reality.” His
speech is a combination of two audio recordings
and his body is made from AI-enhanced footage
from the 1960s. When Cline saw the results for
the first time: “I got goosebumps.”
After meeting half-holographic Walt, guests
are ushered into a theatre-themed room
dedicated to the founder’s first years in show-
business. The history ends here, however, as
fans move on to exhibition rooms with loose
themes such as The Illusion of Life and The Spirit
of Adventure and Discovery. It’s thrilling to see
the titular bedknob from 1971’s Bedknobs and
Broomsticks, but perhaps less so to see a clock
that animators used as a reference when drawing
1940s Pinocchio.
There’s some novel interactive tech: a book
comes to life as you flick through it, playing
Sleeping Beauty’s story on a screen. Yet after an
hour’s exploration, the answer to the question
“How do you summarise everything that Disney
has done in a century?” seems to be, “You don’t.”
Disney’s dark past? Disney+ deftly acknowledges
the company’s history of racism, adding a con-
tent warning before films such as Dumbo and
The Jungle Book. “This program includes

negative depictions and/or mistreatment
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
56 Culture
Exhibition
of people or cultures. These stereotypes were
wrong then and are wrong now,” the disclaimer
reads. “Rather than remove this content, we want
to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it
and spark conversation to create a more inclusive
future together.”
Nowhere is this harmful impact acknowledged
in the exhibition. “We didn’t consciously decide
not to include anything controversial,” Cline
says. “It’s a general story of Disney and we don’t
get specific in any area. We don’t talk about many,
many subjects because there isn’t the room or the
ability to do it in this kind of event.”
Perhaps it wouldn’t make sense to have a
gallery entitled All the Times We Were Bigoted,
and Disney historian Paula Sigman-Lowery
argues that this is, after all, a birthday event.
“I don’t see it as hiding anything,” she says.
At times, the exhibition is so celebratory
that it becomes boring; there are only so many
instances you can point at something and say it’s
that thing from that film! Walt
▼ Mouse call knew that engaging stories
Curators chose need baddies and goodies,
familiar exhibits ups and downs. There is so
for every much odd and fascinating
generation Disney history that it seems
DISNEY a shame to make room for a
dress worn by Emma Stone
in 2021’s Cruella but not for the 1943 anti-Nazi
propaganda film Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which
Donald Duck works in a German artillery factory.
Cline says: “We had to make sure this
exhibition was appropriate for all ages and it was
of interest to all cultures” – great care was taken
to ensure there were “recognisable” exhibits for
every generation. Perhaps this is why there is
a healthy dose of Marvel and Star Wars content.
The zeros in the Disney100 logo bleed together
into an infinity symbol, and Cline says she is look-
ing forward to “the next 100 years”. “Walt Disney
once said we are just getting started,” Cline says.
“And he was sure right.”
AMELIA TAIT IS A FEATURES WRITER
Disney100: The Exhibition is at the Franklin
Institute, Philadelphia to 27 August; at Kleine
Olympiahalle, Munich to 3 September; at ExCel,
London from 13 October
Reviews
FILM
Oppenheimer
Dir. Christopher Nolan
★★★★☆
The wartime Soviet intelligence
services had a codename for the
Manhattan Project, the US plan
to build an atom bomb: Enormoz.
Christopher Nolan’s film about it
is absolutely Enormoz: filling the
screen with a million agonised
fragments that are the shattered
dreams and memories of the
project’s driving force, J Robert
Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist
with the temperament of an artist
who gave humanity the means of its
own destruction.
The main event is the nuclear
test in the New Mexico desert in
July 1945, when Oppenheimer
is said to have silently pondered
(and later intoned on TV) Vishnu’s
lines from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become
Death, the destroyer of worlds …”
For all its audacity and ambition,
the film never quite solves the
problem of its own obtuseness:
filling the drama with the torment
of genius-functionary Oppenheimer
at the expense of showing the
Japanese experience and the people
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Cillian Murphy is an eerily close
lookalike for Oppenheimer, giving
us the million-yard stare, seeing and
foreseeing things he cannot process.
The purest payload of fear is
delivered after the detonation of the
Hiroshima bomb; Murphy shows
us Oppenheimer in shock, but
also realising he has to address his
cheering colleagues.
In the end, Nolan shows us how
the US’s governing class couldn’t
tolerate being in the debt of this
liberal intellectual. Oppenheimer
is the sacrificial hero-fetish of the
American century. Peter Bradshaw
On general release
FILM
Barbie
Dir. Greta Gerwig
★★★★☆
Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s
cinematic reinvention of Mattel’s
most (in)famous toy comes on like
a sugar-rush mashup of Pixar’s Toy
Story 2, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio,
the cult live-action feature Josie
and the Pussycats and the Roger
Ebert-scripted exploitation
romp Beyond the Valley of the
Dolls. It’s a riotously entertaining
candy-coloured feminist fable
that manages simultaneously to
celebrate, satirise and deconstruct
its plastic subject. Audiences will be
delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.
At the centre is Margot Robbie’s
“Stereotypical Barbie”. A visit to
Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie”
reveals that a wormhole has
opened between the pink world
of perfection and the one we live
in. Our fairytale heroine must take
a ride to reality. Meanwhile at Mattel
HQ, Will Ferrell wants Barbie “back
in the box”. By now, Barbie has been
told: “You’ve been making women
feel bad about themselves.” The
spectre of unrealisable expectation
is slyly reconfigured into a
weirdly liberating parable about
being whatever (size, profession,
attitude) you want to be. Observer
Mark Kermode On general release

Podcast of the week Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History

This lively take on Black history takes its title from
“drapetomania”, a supposed mental health condition a white
doctor invented in 1851 to explain why slaves f led captivity. In the
f irst episode they profile Forest Joe, a 19th-century South Carolina
bandit who led a band of runaways. Alexi Duggins

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

 Culture
Books
T R AV E L
Time traveller
Jaded from witnessing
horrifying violence,
a journalist sets off
through the Caucasus
on foot and discovers
cause for optimism
By Angus Macqueen
▲ Fringe dwellers
Past meets
present in
the Caucasus
TOM PARFITT
57
the second world war to the destruction of the
Chechen capital, Grozny, by the Russian Army in
1995 and 2000. At almost every stop, he marvels
at the dignity of the people he meets. Food is
shared while tales are told from a village whose
sons fought for the Red Army all the way to the
heart of Europe while the men, women and chil-
dren who remained behind were deported en
masse to Central Asia, dying in huge numbers.
The resonance with Russia today is weird.
These republics provide huge numbers of sol-
diers to the Russian army fighting in Ukraine.
Meanwhile huge swathes of Dagestan and
Chechnya are under varying levels of repression,
as Moscow fights to control Islamic extremism
and the fighters who “go to the woods”. Parfitt
is entering the mountains where the legendary
Imam Shamil resisted the Russians in the 19th
century for more than 30 years; more recently
they provided protection to Shamil Basayev, the
Chechen leader behind the Beslan siege. Read-
ing Parfitt’s account of his own interrogation at
military checkpoints surrounding the mountain
T
om Parfitt is full of questions, guilt and fortress of Gimri, where Shamil made a famous
regrets; a good man. Brought up on a stand, it is no surprise that in 2022 the biggest
Norfolk farm, Russia lover, adventurer demonstration against Putin’s mobilisation order
and correspondent, this complex narra- was by mothers in Dagestan.
tor is both at the heart and at the edge of a remark- This points to the weakness of Parfitt’s book.
able attempt to uncover the wildest and least His walk took place more than 15 years ago.
known frontier of Europe. Quite why he did not write the account of his
Brave, stubborn but amusingly self-effacing, remarkable odyssey more immediately is not
he sets himself a 1,600km walk from the Black clear. I yearned for a greater sense of how these
Sea to the Caspian, along the string of mountain- uncontrollable borderlands are responding to
ous republics that make up Russia’s southern events today. That criticism may be ungener-
border. Across dramatic landscapes, he engages ous given the magical moments that pepper his
with a timeless world of shepherds who graze account, from Chechnya’s monstrous leader
their flocks in the “mystical” highlands in sum- Ramzan Kadyrov dancing with his followers in
mer, only to return to a patchwork of ethnic and a sufi trance to a walking companion taking to
religious communities in winter. Parfitt unravels a child’s bike when struggling to keep up with
how the Caucasus form “a landscape of unfin- Parfitt on foot. Every instance of motorised trans-
ished histories”. He runs into bears, wars and port is recorded as a defeat.
“permanent zones of counter-terrorist organisa- Parfitt concludes with optimism based on
tion” as well as generosity and hospitality from the people he met. It is difficult to share. These
peoples with almost nothing to share. Caucasians have not benefited from the prosper-
His journey begins in madness too. In 2004 he ity that oil and natural resources have brought
is sent to cover the seizure by militant Chechens Russia. Moscow has been transformed over the
of more than 1,000 hostages in a school in Beslan, past few decades, but Parfitt’s account of the
North Ossetia. He was witness to the inhuman- floors he slept on suggest little has changed since
ity of the hostage takers and to the catastrophic the 19th century. At the same time, for this land of
“rescue attempt”; 333 hostages died, of which untold histories, Putin has closed Memorial, the
186 were children. That night President Putin human rights organisation set up to collect the
told the nation what he had learned: “We showed past and the present. Tellingly, Parfitt says he has
ourselves to be weak. And the weak get changed some names for the ongoing
beaten.” The events of those days set safety of those he met all those years
Parfitt on his trek, “not as a reporter, ago. He does, though, name one of
but as a human being”. Memorial’s bravest members, Natasha
Parfitt is walking into the heart of Estemirova. She was murdered in 2009
some of Russia’s deepest myths of in Chechnya for her work recording the
imperial conquest, born out of the brutality of Kadyrov and his acolytes.
literary giants of his adopted country: BOOK OF Her daughter, in exile in London, tells
Lermontov, Pushkin and Tolstoy. At THE WEEK Parfitt her mother’s name is now just
the same time, he tramps into more High Caucasus “a whisper there”. Observer
recent histories, from mass deporta- By Tom Parfitt ANGUS MACQUEEN IS A DOCUMENTARY
tions by Stalin’s secret police during FILM-MAKER
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly
58 Culture
Books

C
FICTION hain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant called Links and that these Links never fight
circus of a novel, action-packed and one another, only gladiators from rival pris-
expansive, almost too much to pro- ons. The most successful fighters become pop
cess. It plays out in a dystopian US just idols, sex symbols. If they survive three years
Missing links a shuffle-step from the norm, where predomi- on the tour, they win the ultimate prize: a get-
nantly Black prisoners fight for the entertainment out-of-jail card. Naturally, most won’t make it
Prisoners fight for of a primetime TV audience and, indirectly, for that far. The average life expectancy for a Link
the reader’s benefit too. The narrative explodes in is three months.
survival on reality TV all directions. The tale at the centre is sometimes Just as most hit TV shows plunder from
in a dystopia of obscured. The book is unruly and knowingly material that has scored well in the past, so too
compromised but it comes fuelled by a sense of does Chain-Gang All-Stars, which lifts freely from
doomed love and thrilling, righteous rage. The Hunger Games and The Running Man, Roll-
industrialised racism Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah landed erball and Battle Royale. Where it dif-
an ardent fanbase with his bestselling fers from more straightforward genre
2018 debut, Friday Black, a collection fare is in foregrounding what would
of speculative short stories depict- normally remain as a political subtext.
By Xan Brooks ing a culture in which bargain-crazed Adjei-Brenyah wants to highlight the
consumers attack a department store, factual springboards beneath his
and white tourists at a theme park flights of fancy, providing footnotes
pay for the pleasure of shooting the Chain-Gang to explain the intricacies of the 13th
Black staff. Chain-Gang All-Stars also All-Stars amendment, the psychological effects
began life as a short story before blow- By Nana Kwame of solitary confinement and the 1944
ing up, like the proverbial mosquito Adjei-Brenyah state murder of 14-year-old George
that accidentally taps an artery, to the Stinney. Chain-Gang All-Stars, he
point where its high-concept conceit becomes a stresses, isn’t fantasy at all. Instead, it’s a night-
conduit for the intertwined horrors of privatised marish burlesque about industrialised racism.
prisons, reality TV and the Wagner group’s army The sheer weight of this supporting evidence –
of convicts in Ukraine. This is such a rich seam happily accommodated by the book’s maximalist
to mine that it feels borderline unmanageable. style – frequently spins us off course. Alternating
Undeterred, Adjei-Brenyah builds a plausible chapters roam far and wide, keeping tabs on a
fictional world within our implausible real one. supporting cast of TV executives, “abolitionist”
He tells us that Chain-Gang All-Stars Battle- protesters and a sceptical armchair critic who is
ground is the top-rated show on the Criminal slowly sucked in and converted. These cutaways
Action Penal Entertainment channel (Cape) and give Chain-Gang All-Stars the bracing panoramic
that the hammer-wielding Loretta Thurwar is sweep of an old-school social novel in the vein
the star of the circuit, with scores of bloody of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, but the technique
victories already under her belt. He explains needs finessing. As it is, Adjei-Brenyah combines
how the combatants in each chain gang are the winning confidence of a young artist who is
ALAMY

POLITICS
Post-truth pathogen
The self-replicating
mechanism by which
a conspiracy theory
became a contagion
is deftly unpacked in
this study of QAnon
By Rafael Behr
M
ost people made aware of a plot to Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the
kidnap and murder children on an World. It is a disturbing study of the origins and
industrial scale would want to do resilience of an exceptionally versatile and perni-
something about it. It is hardly sur- cious network of paranoid digital malcontents.
prising that Edgar Maddison Welch, learning of Pizzagate is just one subplot in the sprawling
such a wicked scheme, and outraged that law edifice of QAnon belief. Adherents are lured in
enforcement agencies were doing nothing, took down any number of channels – Donald Trump fan-
matters into his own hands. dom; vaccine hesitancy; self-pitying adolescent
On 4 December 2016, Welch brought an assault video-gamer virginity recast as militant misogyny.
rifle and handgun down to Comet Ping Pong, In some respects, QAnon is a rehash of old con-
a pizzeria in Washington DC, to liberate the chil- spiracy theories, drawing on established tropes
dren held captive there in the basement. But he from the analogue age: a vast secret world govern-
found no children and no basement. ment; antisemitic “blood libels” about ritual child
This didn’t put a stop to “Pizzagate”, murder that date back centuries. But
a deranged fantasy among online the 21st-century version is indigenous
sleuths who had identified Comet Ping to the internet, emerging from nerdy
Pong as the hub for a satanic paedo- chatrooms, then evolving to thrive
phile ring based around Hillary Clin- across digital ecosystems.
ton’s presidential campaign. As with Ball, a former Guardian journalist,
many conspiracy theories, the absence was once an habitué of 4chan, where
of evidence could be folded back into The Other the anonymous “Q” first posted tan-
the narrative as proof of a cover-up. Pandemic talising clues about an unfolding plot
That self-replicating mechanism is By James Ball at the apex of power. This equips
deftly unpacked by James Ball in The him well for the task of sequencing

The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023

 59

unafraid to tackle an enormous canvas with the BOOKS OF THE MONTH

nervousness of a debutant who worries about A roundup of the best recent translated fiction
leaving his reader with the same group of people
for more than a few pages at a time. His plot is
constantly interrupting itself to move us along By John Self Kalaf Epalanga was isolate; subdivide certain
and show us something new. touring northern Europe categories of pieces by
At the book’s heart sits a love story: Thurwar’s in 2008, he lost his hue or by grain … ” But
doomed romance with her fellow Link, Hurricane passport and was detained best of all in this uniquely
Staxxx, who quotes poetry to camera and weeps at the Sweden-Norway refreshing book is the final
after each kill. We know that Links in the same border. The incident exchange of childhood
gang don’t fight one another, and Thurwar is only inspired Epalanga’s memories by two old men.
two weeks away from her “freeing day”. Except satisfying debut novel, “There wasn’t much else,
that inevitably the game is rigged and the two in which the narrative in life.” “No, it’s almost all
lovers are put on a collision course. This cheat about the power of music down there.”
is so brazen that even Micky Wright – the show’s and dance fizzes with
slick compere – is briefly revolted and can barely Austral energy. Epalanga’s wry
read out the announcement. By Carlos Fonseca, account of immigrant life
Adjei-Brenyah sets about these proceedings as translated by Megan in Portugal is tempered
though he’s an MC himself. He’s a vivid voice in McDowell with memories of the civil
the drama, a firm hand on the decks; here to keep If a book-within-a-book war and colonialism that
the show rolling, provide contextual informa- isn’t ambitious enough brought him there. But
tion and whet the appetite ahead of the tale’s big for you, Costa Rican what expands the novel
action set pieces. His prose, tellingly, is at its most writer Carlos Fonseca beyond memoir are the
exhilarating during the bloodiest clashes, when has just the thing: two second and third parts,
it’s torn between disgust and excitement, seem- books within a book. from the viewpoints of The Love of Singular Men
ingly intent on implicating the author alongside US university lecturer Sofia – Epalanga’s wife By Victor Heringer,
everyone else. Julio remembers British back in Portugal – and translated by James Young
Cape, we are told, is in the business of creating Aliza (“who swore she Eyvind, a member of the Also obsessed with
“elegant and sustainable entertainment ecosys- had kissed Sid Vicious”), Norwegian immigration memory is Camilo, the
tems”, in which we all play our part whether we whom he knew decades police, whose story is disabled narrator of the
choose to or not. The protesters are creative col- earlier. A letter tells him chilling and enthralling. first book by the Brazilian
laborators to be accommodated. Dissent creates that Aliza, the author of novelist Victor Heringer to
buzz, which leads to better ratings. There’s no four novels, is dead, and be translated into English.
escape, the book argues. We are all links in the wanted him to edit her He remembers “my
chain. Thurwar and Staxxx are the products. final manuscript. A Private Cosme, my first and only”,
The consumer is us. Language – a story of the the orphan his father
XAN BROOKS IS A WRITER, BROADCASTER failed “New Germany” brings to their home in the
AND CRITIC in Paraguay co-founded town of Queím, and whose
by Nietzsche’s sister – is appearance coincides
accompanied by Aliza’s with Camilo’s discovery
the movement’s cultural and social DNA. He is notebook, Dictionary of of his sexuality. (When
especially insightful on the influence of online Loss, featuring collage You, Bleeding Childhood he sees men’s calves,
role-playing games and the cultivated ambiguity images representing By Michele Mari, “my penis awoke in little
around what is meant to be taken seriously and expression that words translated by Brian jerks”.) Three decades
what comes draped in irony. The original trolling cannot achieve. Aliza’s Robert Moore after Cosme’s murder,
ethos was steeped in nihilistic mischief. work was intended for There’s a Calvino-esque their two weeks together
That slippery joking-not-joking idiom made it only one person, but blend of the playful remain the centre of what
hard for mainstream politics to get a purchase on Fonseca’s novel should and the rigorous to this is left of Camilo’s life.
QAnon before it found its real-life incarnation in have wider appeal. collection of stories by the “I’ll soon be thickening
Donald Trump. Its digital fingerprints turned up Italian author about his up the soup of the
all over the Capitol insurrection. The insurgents’ childhood. It opens with a dead.” The brief, precise
failure provoked premature forecasts of QAnon’s father putting his precious scenes – incorporating
demise. Instead, the virus mutated and spread. comics out of reach of photos, lists and
Ball argues that QAnon is best understood as a his soon-to-appear baby handwritten passages
literal pathogen. It is a pandemic ravaging demo- son, and moves through a – enable Heringer to
cratic discourse in the same way that Covid-19 child’s difficult transition cover a great deal in a
assaulted respiratory tracts. from comics to books, short space and make a
Mistrust in politics has been debilitating an obsessive report on potentially gloomy story
democratic immune systems since before social drinking-fountain hygiene into a multilayered
media incubated this new strain of conspiracy Whites Can Dance Too that reads like a juvenile celebration of life. That
theory. That, Ball concludes, is a chronic condi- By Kalaf Epalanga, Nicholson Baker, and the the author died in 2018,
tion for which there is no quick technological fix. translated by Daniel Hahn poetry of his mother’s aged 29, is a loss to
RAFAEL BEHR IS A GUARDIAN COLUMNIST AND When the then Portugal- jigsaw-solving technique. international literature.
LEADER WRITER based Angolan musician “Scrupulously comb, flip, JOHN SELF IS A BOOK CRITIC

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
y
MODER N LIFE
Tim Dowling
I’m going to
start answering
the door holding
a chainsaw
I
open the front door to find two
women standing on the other
side of it, one of them poised to
push the bell.
“Oh!” she says, taking a step back.
“Hello,” I say.
“I can see we’ve caught you at a
busy moment,” she says. She means:
I see that you are holding a large
electric hedge trimmer.
By this point, my wife had already
asked me several times to cut the
hedge that grows along one edge of
the front garden. I had already said
that I was leaving it untrimmed on
purpose – for the bees.
A week later, the blossom had
fallen off the hedge, and my wife
asked me again. A week after that
she asked me once more, presenting
me with our cordless hedge trimmer.
“What, now?” I said. My wife
answered this by raising an eyebrow.
“Ugh, fine,” I said, carrying the
trimmer to the front door, where I
found these two women.
“We’re just giving people leaflets,”
says the second woman, standing
slightly behind the first woman.
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
“OK,” I say. What I should say is: I
don’t normally come to the door with
a hedge trimmer. If I had opened
the door after you’d rung the bell, I
would have put it down to answer.
But none of this occurs to me.
“So we’ll leave one for you, if we
may,” says the first woman, holding
out a leaflet with two fingers.
“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.” I take the
leaflet, smile and close the door.
The front page says: “How do you
view the future? Will our world … stay
the same? Get worse? Get better?”
“Get worse,” I say, opening the
leaflet to see if I got the answer right.
But the answer appears to be: get
better, because of God. I open the
door again, the coast is clear.
Once I’m outside I can see why my
wife raised her eyebrow. It’s a shared
hedge, and the contrast between our
side and next door’s side is pretty
marked. On our side the hedge is
encroaching on the path between
the street and the step, so that you
have to lean slightly to get to the
front door. It must be unwelcoming
for visitors. Though not as
unwelcoming as a man answering
the door with a hedge trimmer.
I start with the top, aiming for
something neat but not overly
boxy. There’s such a thing as too
welcoming. As I work I begin think of
all the times I’ve found myself facing
a stranger at my own front door,
feeling put upon, conned, mildly
threatened. A man once shat on my
doorstep because I refused to buy a
washing-up brush from him. I think
about how all those past interactions
could have been reframed, if only I’d
answered the door while holding a
bladed gardening implement.
The best thing, I think, as I
taper the bottom of the hedge so it
narrows towards the ground, would
be an idling chainsaw, accessorised
with some protective eyewear and a
set of armoured sleeves.
“Is it important?” I would say.
“I’m kind of in the middle of
something.”
I would be polite, but the message
would be clear: go shit on someone
else’s doorstep.
I consider the finished hedge
from all angles – it looks straight,
if a little depleted. I go back inside,
leaving the trimmer on the little
bench by the coats. In the sitting
room I find the middle one watching
the tennis while perusing the leaflet
the women left.
“The answer isn’t ‘get worse’,” I
say, sitting down. “Even though it is.”
I hear my wife open the front
door, pause, and close the door. She
comes in with a rake in her hand.
“Are you expecting me to clean all
A man those trimmings up?” she says.
once “No,” I say.
“You are, aren’t you?”
defecated “I’ll do it in a minute,” I say,
on my pointing at the telly. “This is on a
knife-edge.”
doorstep “I’ll do it,” she says. “If you just
because could manage to put the hedge
trimmer back where it lives, that
I refused would be great.”
“Sure,” I say, thinking: it lives
to buy right there, by the front door. I’m
a brush going to put up a hook for it.
 KITCHEN AIDE
By Anna Berrill
Capture
t the
h elusive perfection of
stone fruit – and save some for later
How do I use summer fruit – apricots
that refuse to soften, cherries, figs,
etc – in savoury dishes?
Simon, Bristol, England, UK
In its raw state, stone fruit can
so often disappoint – it’s rare to
catch, say, a peach or apricot at its
perfect moment. For this reason,
Dee Rettali, co-founder of Fortitude
Bakehouse in London, suggests
turning up the heat.
“Apricots baked with capers is a
good one, and really nice with rice
or a chopped salad.” It couldn’t be
simpler: halve and stone the fruit,
then pop them in the oven with a
little water and oil, and roast until
softened. Once they’re cool enough
to handle, chop into small pieces,
then “get some good gherkins
and capers, chop them finely
with sea salt and pepper, and fold
through the fruit”.
Apricots should also find their
way into a Moroccan pastilla pie.
“Cook them down, then layer with
almonds and mint,” Rettali says.
“It’s a fantastic dinner party dish.”
As for cherries, try zaalouk, she
says. Make a dressing by blitzing
sun-dried tomatoes, cherries, sweet
paprika and lots of pepper. Char
the aubergines, then chop, transfer
to a pan with lemon juice, olive oil
and confit garlic, and cook “until
it becomes like a paste”. Add the
cherry mix, and eat with feta.
For Joshua Overington, the
chef/owner of Mýse in North
DAN MATTHEWS
Yorkshire, figs can be used in myriad
dishes. At home, Overington’s
“favourite thing is to roast halved
figs with sweet onion, hearty herbs
[rosemary or sage, say], and a bit
of balsamic vinegar and olive oil,
until caramelised and sticky”. You
could even utilise the leaves to
wrap meat before cooking.
Then, of course, there are salad
days. You’ll be hard pushed to better
Guardian contributor Ravinder
Bhogal’s maftoul salad topped
with watermelon infused with rose
water or Ed Smith’s chopped grilled
peaches from his book Crave, which
he combines with basil, olive oil,
pistachios and lemon juice, and sits
on burrata. Alternatively, transform
a glut of strawberries into Rettali’s
go-to dressing of the moment:
“Put balsamic vinegar, basil, lots
of strawberries, salt and pepper
through a blender with a tiny bit
of hot water,” then fold through
couscous, quinoa or rye grain with
a load of chopped parsley.
Finally, preserve some summer
love for colder days. Pickled
gooseberries or blackberries,
for example, work a treat with
mackerel, while cherries will come
out tops come Christmas. “Stone
them, then put in brine with port
and bay leaves,” suggests Rettali.
“They’re a great present, and
delicious with cold turkey.”
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
Got a culinary dilemma? Email
feast@theguardian.com
T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Nigel Slater
№ 228
Vegetable and
herb rice
Serves 4 At the kitchen counter,
unter, chopping.
• GLUTEN FREE
The herbs’ fragrance nce comes in
waves. Verdant, fresh sh. First, there’s
mild parsley. The wake-upke-up call of
mint. Dill, grass-green and watery.
This is at its best when the rice
is still warm and the herbs freshly
chopped. Use edamame instead of
broad beans if the fancy takes you.
Ingredients Method
For the rice Put the rice in a deep bowl, cover
25g butter with warm water and swish the rice
150g basmati rice with your fingers until the water is
½ tsp salt
milky. Empty, then repeat with more
4 cloves
6 black peppercorns
water, once, maybe twice, until it is
½ cinnamon stick almost clear.
8 green cardamom Melt the butter in a deep,
pods medium-sized pan over a moderate
heat. Add the salt, cloves,
For the herbs peppercorns and cinnamon stick.
and greens Crack the cardamom pods, but leave
400g broad beans the seeds intact, then add. When the
or edamame, shelled
spices are warm and fragrant, drain
weight
300g peas, podded
the rice and stir into the spices until
weight the rice is glossy with butter. Cover
4 spring onions with a couple of centimetres of
2 medium water, then bring to the boil. Cover
courgettes tightly with a lid, lower the heat, and
2 cloves garlic simmer for 10 minutes. Turn off the
2 tbsp olive oil heat, but don’t remove the lid.
20g parsley leaves Heat a pan of water, salt lightly.
15g mint sprigs
When it comes to the boil, add the
10g coriander leaves
and stems
broad beans or edamame and the
15g dill peas. Cook for 3 or 4 minutes until
50g shelled tender and drain. Finely chop the
pistachios spring onions and roughly dice the
A few pinches of courgettes. Chop the garlic.
dried rose petals Drain the peas and beans, dry the
(optional) pan, return it to the heat and pour in
the olive oil. Add the spring onions,
courgette and garlic and cook for
5 or 6 minutes, stirring occasionally,
until the cut sides are gold, then
remove from the heat. Roughly chop
the pistachios. Finely chop the dill,
parsley, mint leaves and coriander.
Mix the herbs, pistachios, spring
onion and courgettes, beans and
peas. Combine with the cooked rice
and mix thoroughly. If you wish,
scatter in dried rose petals. Observer
28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly

62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 What was the first UK TV
programme to give away
a £1m prize?
2 What is the world’s most
populous island?
3 Jayaben Desai led which
1970s industrial dispute?
4 What sporting
equipment is sourced from
Ailsa Craig in Scotland?
5 Which newspaper was
“written by office boys for
office boys”?
6 Which entertainment
venue burned down in 1613?
7 What dessert’s name is
the Italian for “drowned”?
8 Which college awards
Fifty-Pound fellowships?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
DZIGGETAI
a) Zulu short spear
b) Ghanaian dance
c) Mongolian wild ass
d) crane native to Ladakh
2 Alphabet Soup
Add to BLNQST the
letters A, E, I, O, U & Y, and
CHESS
Leonard Barden
There is an eternal
argument over whether
Bobby Fischer, Garry
Kasparov or Magnus
Carlsen is the all-time
No 1 in men’s chess, but
there is no debate about
the No 1 woman. Judit
Polgar, whose peak career
rating was 2735 and who
for more than a decade
was ranked among or
close to the world top
10 grandmasters, was
and is in a league of her
own, 49 points ahead of
her nearest challenger,
Hou Yifan, who is herself
clearly the all-time No 2.
Polgar no longer plays
The Guardian Weekly 28 July 2023
What links:
9 Dyfed-Powys; North
Wales; South Wales;
Gwent; heddlu?
10 Men’s one-hour run
(Farah) and men’s triple
jump (Edwards)?
11 Stadtholder William I;
John Wayne’s Sean
Thornton; Kevin Smith;
IDS?
12 Blades; Diogenes;
Drones; Egotists?
13 Jude the Obscure;
Bosnian war; Factory
Records; Tristram Shandy;
Philip Green?
14 Torah; Nevi’im;
Ketuvim?
15 Pet Shop Boys;
Art of Noise; Saint
Etienne; Gay Dad?
stir to make a word.
3 Same Difference
Identify these words that
differ in the letter shown:
** *****
(European newspaper)
*****A**
(refreshing drink)
4 Poet’s Corner
Sound of poet in whom
the affirmative followed
the negative? (5)
© CMM2023
competitively, but she has
forged a new reputation as
a commentator on major
events, noted for her sharp
spotting of hidden tactical
resources. Last week she
was online reporting on
the €500,000 ($560,000)
world title match in
Chongqing between Ju
Wenjun and Lei Tingjie.
3877 Lawrence Trent v Harriet Hunt,
4NCL 2012. Black to move and win.
CINEM A CONNECT
Killian Fox
Name the films and the musician
who connects them.
by Nina Simone.
Before Sunset (2004) all feature songs
Shallow Grave, Inland Empire and
LEMONADE. 4 NOYES. Cinema Connect
1 c). 2 QUESTIONABLY. 3 LE MONDE,
featuring music journalists. Maslanka
divisions of the Hebrew Bible. 15 Bands
Winterbottom films. 14 Traditional
Lord Peter Wimsey. 13 Inspired Michael
Bond; Sherlock Holmes; Bertie Wooster;
Smith. 12 Fictional London clubs: James
Bob; political “quiet man” Iain Duncan
Quiet Man in John Ford film; plays Silent
11 Quiet men: William the Silent; The
world records held by British athletes.
forces; police in Welsh. 10 (Outdoor)
Oxford. 9 Police in Wales: regional
6 Globe theatre. 7 Affogato. 8 All Souls,
(according to PM Lord Salisbury).
strike. 4 Curling stones. 5 Daily Mail
Quiz 1 TFI Friday. 2 Java. 3 Grunwick
Answers
There is a longstanding
debate about why men
perform better and it
is most dramatic at the
2700 level of elite GMs,
a standard currently
achieved by 34 men but
which only Polgar has ever
surpassed consistently
among women.
For male grandmasters,
2800 has been the ceiling,
a level only Kasparov and
Carlsen have surpassed
consistently throughout
their careers.
advance of the h pawn.
7 Nd1 Qh5 and Qxh2 followed by the
winning by 5....Kxf8 6 Rd8+ Kg7
4 Qg4 Qxg4+ 5 Kf1. Black is still
have escaped immediate mate by
end of the story because White could
Qh3! However, this isn’t quite the
White resigned because of 3 Kxg1
3877 1...Rxg2+ 2 Kf1 Rg1+! and
Notes and Queries
The long-running series that invites
readers to send in questions and
answers on anything and everything
COU N T RY DI A RY
LONG DEAN
Wiltshire, England, UK
I
’m delayed setting out on
my rounds this evening,
enchanted by a green
woodpecker perched opposite
the house. It is dipping its beak,
dining on ants, each bob revealing
a yellow flash. I stop to share this
with Lee who is painstakingly
reinstating a drystone wall that
runs along the bridleway to the
Lower Mill.
“Dry” has invariably been our
theme of nightly conversation since
works began. There was once a ford
in Long Dean which was recreated
with last winter’s deluge, but we
recall it wryly now. Though we’ve
had glowering skies, rain has failed
to fall meaningfully here. My eye
catches the roller, lying redundant
– we never did get to employ it
before the ground dried solid. Nor is
there hope of driving in fence posts.
They’ll be jobs for the autumn.
I head on down the meadow.
Beside me, the river dawdles, almost
stagnant in places. Turning up the
slope of Middle Hill, I make a steady
scritch-scritch as I stride. It’s been
a year of prodigious growth and the
grass has got ahead of us. That’s not
necessarily a bad thing – the higher
sward has protected the grazing
beneath from being scorched.
But there are triffid-like thistles
in places, stems sapling-thick.
A steer works obligingly at my job,
de-heading them before they seed.
As I near the top, I scan the
horizon for the yearlings. Not fully
grown, they aren’t easy to spot, but
a swish of a tail leads me to where
they graze on the brow of the hill.
They look fabulous, coats shiny and
darkened by the sun.
Wild orchids grace the bank
below. A marbled white butterfly
sits atop one, perfectly still. I stand
amongst the cattle for a while,
listening as they pull mouthfuls of
grass. Sarah Laughton
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords
Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. 63
Download from the App Store or Google Play.
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Quick crossword
No 16,598
8 9 1 2 3 4

10 11 6 7

8 9

12 13 14 15

 All solutions published next week

10 11 12

16 17 18 19 20

13 14 15

21 22 23

16 17 18

24 25

19

26 27

The Weekly cryptic By Brummie Across 14 Inscribed plate marking a

5 Object of an experiment (6,3) notable person or event (6)
No 29,125 8 Nose (informal) (4) 15 Muslim leader (6)
9 Coalition (8) 17 Send an SMS message (4)
10 Skilful (6)
Across 7 Putting a lid on piano, celebrated vocalist
11 Work in the kitchen (4,2)
1 It requires a truly consistent performance demonstrates one way to sing (1,8)
13 Parody (4-2)
from its cast (9) 13 Formerly, formerly (9)
15 Place of worship (6)
6 Finish filming western with pop music (4) 14 Entertainer Chuck plus reindeer (3-6)
16 Flap hanging below the waist in
8 Book about our deceptive barrier causes 17 Music culture movement responsible for bad
formal male wear (4-4)
fuss (8) trip during dance (7)
18 Domestic worker (4)
9 From casual perusal, telescope finally picked 18 Avoid ‘en’ shaped like a birthmark (7) Solution No 16,592
19 Free from blame (9)
out a star (6) 20 Are in conflict with USA over one C UMM E R B U N D
10 Food chain: bear comes first, though not geographical area (7) N I I X A A
invariably top (6) 22 In effect, we ensure bard’s in the middle (5) Down O R G A N I C V I S T A
11 Oil perhaps to be seen from ocean liner? (8) 23 Seconds before bird’s sudden dash (5) 1 Part of an unhealthy diet (4,4) M A X E A C Z
12 Dramatic family union abandoned? Here’s a 2 All in one piece (6) D I R T R E T R I E V E
3 Looking unwell (6) E T D I N R
pill! (6)
4 Oral exam (4) P R I V E T C A N T A B
15 When depressed, you could find it helps to get L N L A N A
over the threshold (8) 6 Persist in spite of difficulties U N S T E A D Y S A R I
16 Hairgrip made of copper with reverse catch (7,2) M I G R E M J
(5,3) 7 Hair band (9) E N D E R I N D I A N A
19 Head driller and surrogate parent (6) 12 Person with whom one has a E A F G S N
21 Iced preparation used in horse health scheme profound affinity (8) P R OM E T H E U S
(8)
Solution No 29,119
22 Hardline leader breaks up rubbish party (6)
24 Life of a celebrity that’s been shot (6)
Sudoku
25 After a number of deliveries, he collects ball F S E R T U Medium
for Oxford defender? (8) B E G I N N E R E T H A N E Fill in the grid so
26 Horn sound in live recording (4) M N I E B U T that every row,
27 Suspect ranted about Brown being K I C K G E T O U T M O R E every column
dismissed? (9) N M A F B U and every 3x3
V I A G R A I N F L A T E D box contains the
Down
S U L E L numbers 1 to 9.
1 Renaissance artist’s Doctor Swallowing Midge
T A N D E M A D D I C T
(5) Last week’s solution
S U S F I
2 Scrapped lunch to take north-eastern link to
D A Y L I G H T K I T S C H
the continent (7)
3 The end of the said potty is missing (5) B I E Y I K
4 Same sad converts got together (7) B R A N D N A M E S B L O C
5 A programmer’s A-Z? (9) U G I I M O V
6 Young predator put away – copper goes by U P P E R S E X E C U T E S
book (4,3) T R T T T R

28 July 2023 The Guardian Weekly