Kategori: News in English

According to an investigation by Hundred Families, a charity that supports and advocates for families affected by mental health homicides, each year an average of 65 mentally ill people carry out killings. Between 2018-2023, 390 mental health patients in England committed, or were suspected of, murder or manslaughter.

The findings come after an independent report exposed a series of NHS failures in the treatment of Valdo Calocane, a man with schizophrenia who killed three people in Nottingham in 2023.

The cases of killers Calocane and Axel Rudakubana – who stabbed three small girls to death and attempted to kill several others in Southport in 2024 when he was 17 years-old – have sparked fierce debate over the place within wider society of people with severe mental health issues. According to many, it appears they don’t have one.

Calocane and Rudakubana were labelled “evil”, “sadistic” and “cowardly”, amid renewed calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty.

When sentencing Rudakubana to a minimum term of 52 years in January 2025, Mr Justice Goose said: “Many who have heard the evidence might describe what he did as evil, who could dispute it?”

Public opinion on the likes of Calocane and Rudakubana seems clear: they are monsters, capable only of inflicting misery on others. At best, they don’t deserve to live among right-minded people. At worst, they don’t deserve to live at all.

It’s now known that both Calocane and Rudakubana had received treatment for severe mental health issues but stopped engaging with health services before committing their crimes. In the eyes of many – including media commentators, politicians and sizeable swaths of the public – suffering severe mental health illness doesn’t affect someone’s responsibility for their actions.

As a human being, I regard the prevailing narrative around stories such as Calocane’s and Rudakubana’s with a tremendous sense of sadness. As an academic specialising in social and cultural perspectives of mental health, I regard it with a profound sense of frustration – and maybe even failure. Let me try to explain why.

A question of accountability

A key reason why those with severe mental health issues are customarily condemned as wicked and irredeemable is that we continue to believe that a person should invariably be held accountable for their own actions. This is a damagingly simplistic view.

Media coverage of Rudakubana often described him as ‘evil’

Anyone who has worked in the field of mental health knows there are many cases in which people’s minds, to all intents and purposes, aren’t their own. Those, like Calocane, suffering from an overwhelming condition such as schizophrenia, for example, frequently have no grasp of reality and have hampered moral reasoning.

It’s reasonable to say some people with severe mental health issues can represent a danger to themselves and others. But this doesn’t mean they should be abandoned or “locked up”. What they need is support from mental health systems that are genuinely integrated, effective and reliable.

Calocane and Rudakubana’s victims, their families and all those cruelly affected by their crimes were catastrophically let down in this respect. But so were Calocane and Rudakubana. The notion that the pair “stopped engaging” is a poor excuse for the cataclysmic shortcomings of a system that should be rooted in diligence, outreach and persistent follow-ups.

However uncomfortable the idea, much of the accountability here lies not with the killers – and that, of course, is what they are – but with those who left them unsupported and in a position to devastate others’ lives and their own. Ultimately, it’s the system itself that disengages – sometimes with the most appalling consequences.

When findings alone aren’t enough

Numerous studies have shown how those in the grip of psychosis and similar illnesses don’t choose to be “evil”. They don’t choose to experience horrific delusions about the world around them. They don’t choose to endure hallucinations that tell them to carry out terrible acts.

Yet the broader public seems to have little or no interest in such findings. Alarmingly, the same might be said of many policymakers. Their knowledge and opinions are instead more likely to be shaped by rhetoric and knee-jerk denunciation.

This goes to the heart of a major challenge for academics in my own field and for the research community as a whole: how best to communicate our work and make it truly accessible. We need to accept that research alone is often woefully insufficient.

A few years ago, in collaboration with Aardman Animations, the studio behind household names such as Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, I produced a series of short films highlighting young people’s mental health. In months, these films reached an audience of more than 17 million. More recently, in another effort to spread the word, I wrote The Wonders of Doctor Bent, a novel that explores society’s lingering propensity to treat isolated and tormented people with the utmost contempt.

None of this is to say research is pointless – yet it’s surely of limited value if the insights it delivers remain largely unacknowledged, especially where matters of the most extraordinary significance are concerned.

As the unhelpful clamour around mental health and “monsters” drags on, the lesson is both clear and familiar: the best way of having conversations about stigma, responsibility and the cost of abdicating our social obligations to those suffering from severe mental illness is to involve the whole of society. Not just the mental health community, police and the justice system, but the general public as well. Läs mer…

According to an investigation by Hundred Families, a charity that supports and advocates for families affected by mental health homicides, each year an average of 65 mentally ill people carry out killings. Between 2018-2023, 390 mental health patients in England committed, or were suspected of, murder or manslaughter.

The findings come after an independent report exposed a series of NHS failures in the treatment of Valdo Calocane, a man with schizophrenia who killed three people in Nottingham in 2023.

The cases of killers Calocane and Axel Rudakubana – who stabbed three small girls to death and attempted to kill several others in Southport in 2024 when he was 17 years-old – have sparked fierce debate over the place within wider society of people with severe mental health issues. According to many, it appears they don’t have one.

Calocane and Rudakubana were labelled “evil”, “sadistic” and “cowardly”, amid renewed calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty.

When sentencing Rudakubana to a minimum term of 52 years in January 2025, Mr Justice Goose said: “Many who have heard the evidence might describe what he did as evil, who could dispute it?”

Public opinion on the likes of Calocane and Rudakubana seems clear: they are monsters, capable only of inflicting misery on others. At best, they don’t deserve to live among right-minded people. At worst, they don’t deserve to live at all.

It’s now known that both Calocane and Rudakubana had received treatment for severe mental health issues but stopped engaging with health services before committing their crimes. In the eyes of many – including media commentators, politicians and sizeable swaths of the public – suffering severe mental health illness doesn’t affect someone’s responsibility for their actions.

As a human being, I regard the prevailing narrative around stories such as Calocane’s and Rudakubana’s with a tremendous sense of sadness. As an academic specialising in social and cultural perspectives of mental health, I regard it with a profound sense of frustration – and maybe even failure. Let me try to explain why.

A question of accountability

A key reason why those with severe mental health issues are customarily condemned as wicked and irredeemable is that we continue to believe that a person should invariably be held accountable for their own actions. This is a damagingly simplistic view.

Media coverage of Rudakubana often described him as ‘evil’

Anyone who has worked in the field of mental health knows there are many cases in which people’s minds, to all intents and purposes, aren’t their own. Those, like Calocane, suffering from an overwhelming condition such as schizophrenia, for example, frequently have no grasp of reality and have hampered moral reasoning.

It’s reasonable to say some people with severe mental health issues can represent a danger to themselves and others. But this doesn’t mean they should be abandoned or “locked up”. What they need is support from mental health systems that are genuinely integrated, effective and reliable.

Calocane and Rudakubana’s victims, their families and all those cruelly affected by their crimes were catastrophically let down in this respect. But so were Calocane and Rudakubana. The notion that the pair “stopped engaging” is a poor excuse for the cataclysmic shortcomings of a system that should be rooted in diligence, outreach and persistent follow-ups.

However uncomfortable the idea, much of the accountability here lies not with the killers – and that, of course, is what they are – but with those who left them unsupported and in a position to devastate others’ lives and their own. Ultimately, it’s the system itself that disengages – sometimes with the most appalling consequences.

When findings alone aren’t enough

Numerous studies have shown how those in the grip of psychosis and similar illnesses don’t choose to be “evil”. They don’t choose to experience horrific delusions about the world around them. They don’t choose to endure hallucinations that tell them to carry out terrible acts.

Yet the broader public seems to have little or no interest in such findings. Alarmingly, the same might be said of many policymakers. Their knowledge and opinions are instead more likely to be shaped by rhetoric and knee-jerk denunciation.

This goes to the heart of a major challenge for academics in my own field and for the research community as a whole: how best to communicate our work and make it truly accessible. We need to accept that research alone is often woefully insufficient.

A few years ago, in collaboration with Aardman Animations, the studio behind household names such as Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, I produced a series of short films highlighting young people’s mental health. In months, these films reached an audience of more than 17 million. More recently, in another effort to spread the word, I wrote The Wonders of Doctor Bent, a novel that explores society’s lingering propensity to treat isolated and tormented people with the utmost contempt.

None of this is to say research is pointless – yet it’s surely of limited value if the insights it delivers remain largely unacknowledged, especially where matters of the most extraordinary significance are concerned.

As the unhelpful clamour around mental health and “monsters” drags on, the lesson is both clear and familiar: the best way of having conversations about stigma, responsibility and the cost of abdicating our social obligations to those suffering from severe mental illness is to involve the whole of society. Not just the mental health community, police and the justice system, but the general public as well. Läs mer…

A movement that wanted to merge North America into one nation and extend its borders as far as the Panama Canal might sound incredibly familiar. But this group, called the “technocracy movement”, was a group of 1930s nonconformists with big ideas about how to rearrange US society. They proposed a vision that would get rid of waste and make North America highly productive by using technology and science.

The Technocrats, sometimes also called Technocracy Inc, proposed merging Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the US and parts of central America into a single continental unit. This they called a “Technate”. It was to be governed by technocratic principles, rather than by national borders and traditional political divisions.

These ideas seem to resonate with some recent statements from the Trump administration about merging the US with Canada. Meanwhile, the US Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) set up by Trump and led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has also outlined a vision of efficiency cuts by slashing bureaucracy, jobs and getting rid of leaders of organisations and civil servants he thinks are advancing “woke” values (such as diversity initiatives). This slash-and-burn approach also fits with some of the ideas of the Technocrats.

In February, Musk said: “We really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people — democracy”. The Technocrats viewed elected politicians as incompetent. They advocated replacing them with experts in science and engineering, who would “objectively” manage resources for the benefit of society.

“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk told reporters after visiting the White House last month.

What did the Technocrats want to get rid of?

The 1930s’ movement was an educational and research organisation that advocated for a fundamental reorganisation of political, social and economic structures in the US and Canada. It drew on a book called Technocracy published in 1921 by an engineer called Walter Henry Smyth, which captured new ideas about management and science.

The movement gained significant attention during the Great Depression, a period of mass unemployment and economic problems lasting from 1929 to 1939. This was a time when widespread economic failures prompted radical ideas for systemic change. Technocracy appealed to those who saw technological advancements as a potential solution to economic inefficiency and inequality.

The Technocrats gained traction largely due to the work of Howard Scott, an engineer and economist, along with a group of engineers and academics from Columbia University. In 1932, Scott founded the Technical Alliance, which later evolved into Technocracy Inc.

Scott and his followers held lectures, published pamphlets and attracted a significant following, particularly among engineers, scientists and progressive thinkers. The movement may have influenced the design of future concepts such as planned communities and economies using more automation.

The movement’s ideological foundation was built on the belief that industrial production and distribution should be managed scientifically. Advocates argued that traditional economic systems such as capitalism and socialism were inefficient and prone to corruption, but that a scientifically planned economy could ensure abundance, stability and fairness.

An image from the Cornell University collection on the Technocracy movement.
Cornell University – PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography

In the 1930s, members of Technocracy Inc sought to replace market-based economies and political governance with a system where experts made decisions based on data, efficiency and technological feasibility. Technocrats aimed to regulate consumption and production based on energy efficiency, rather than market forces.

Technocrats also believed that mechanisation and automation could eliminate much of the need for human labour, reducing work hours while maintaining productivity. Goods and services would be distributed based on scientific calculations of need and sustainability.

While the movement saw rapid growth in the early 1930s, it quickly lost momentum by the mid-to-late 1930s. Echoing some of the concerns of contemporary Americans, critics feared that a government run by unelected experts would lead to a form of authoritarian rule, where decisions were made without public input or democratic oversight.

Technocracy reborn?

But are we seeing a rebirth of some of these kinds of ideas in 2025? Musk has a familial connection with the movement, so is likely to be aware of it. His maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman was a notable figure in the technocracy movement in Canada during the 1930s and 1940s.

Musk’s ventures, such as the electric car giant Tesla, his space programme SpaceX, and neurotechnology company Neuralink prioritise innovation and automation, which aligns with the Technocrats’ vision of optimising human civilisation through scientific and technological means.

Tesla’s push for autonomous vehicles powered by renewable energy, for instance, chime with the movement’s early aspirations for an energy-efficient, machine-managed society. Additionally, SpaceX’s ambition to colonise Mars reflects the belief that technological ingenuity can overcome the limitations of living on Earth.

What Trump would disagree with

There are some significant differences between the current US government and the Technocrats, however. Musk’s approach to commerce remains firmly embedded in the free market.

His ventures thrive on competition and private enterprise rather than that of centralised, expert-led planning. And while the Technocrats believed in the abolition of money, wages and traditional forms of trade, the Trump administration clearly doesn’t.

Trump believes that politicians like him should run the country, along with partners such as Musk. Technocrats worried about elected politicians being driven by self-interest, but the current US administration seems to value mixing business interests with government decisions.

Although the technocracy movement never became a dominant force, its ideas influenced later discussions on topics such as scientific management and economic planning. The concept of data-driven governance championed by the Technocracy movement is part of modern planning, especially in areas like energy efficiency and urban planning.

The rise of AI and big data has reignited discussions about the role (and reach) of technocracy in modern society. In countries including Singapore and China governance is dominated by departments headed by those with technological backgrounds, who gain an elite status.

In the 1930s, the Technocrats faced significant criticism. The unions, more powerful than today, were almost entirely supportive of the progressive New Deal and its protection of workers’ rights, rather than the Technocrats. The US public’s resurgent belief in the US government during the New Deal era was far greater than today’s declining support in its political institutions, so those institutions would have been better equipped to resist challenges than they are today.

The technocracy movement of the 1930s may have faded, but its central ideas continue to shape contemporary debates about the intersection of technology and governmental planning. And, possibly, who should be in charge. Läs mer…

Heathrow Airport, the busiest airport in Europe, was shut down following a fire at a single electricity sub-station on the night of March 20. The fire at the North Hyde substation in Hayes, about 1.5 miles from Heathrow, seriously disrupted the local area’s power supply, including that of the airport.

The closure has caused chaos, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. More than 1,300 flights have been affected, according to the plane tracking website Flightradar24. About 120 of these were already in the air.

Below, a panel of experts offer their insights – and consider the implications of such a major incident. (Elements of this panel were sourced by the Science Media Centre, which published a version here.)

Power in west London is highly constrained

Barry Hayes, associate professor in electrical power systems, University College Cork

It appears that a transformer fire in the North Hyde 275kV substation caused the power outage (videos from the scene clearly show one of the large power transformers ablaze). This is a large electrical substation which supplies the area to the northeast of Heathrow airport as well as the Heathrow airport site. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, the local electricity distributor, said 67,000 homes and businesses in the area were cut off overnight as a result of this issue.

While the North Hyde substation is a very important part of the west London electricity grid, it is generally not expected that this would cause such a big impact at Heathrow airport. There are also dedicated supplies to other parts of the airport site.

Typically, a critical electricity load such as Heathrow would be served from multiple supply points in the electricity grid, and therefore there would be an option to feed the loads at Heathrow from an alternative supply point. There are some reports that parts of the airport (for example, Terminal 5) have power.

The exact reasons for such a big impact are unclear at this point, but we do know the North Hyde substation is in a highly constrained area of the UK electricity grid – an area where there has been “a steep increase in the number of new electricity connection requests across west London, driven by new housing developments, commercial investment and datacentres”.

The UK power grid (as in many developed countries) is generally old or outdated, with many of its components at the end of their anticipated service lifetime and in urgent need of modernisation. These issues may be a factor in the power outage affecting Heathrow. However, it will take some time before the exact causes of this incident are established.

Weather, ageing equipment or malicious attacks could be to blame

Chenghong Gu, professor in smart energy systems, University of Bath

This is a very rare event. Substations are built and operated according to very strict standards, and they are monitored 24/7. There are also many automatic devices in substations like this one to deal with faults.

A substation has many components including transformers, circuit breakers, an isolator, busbars and measuring equipment. Transformers are the most vulnerable to fire. There is insulation oil in them and in high-temperature, high-pressure situations, they can explode – meaning the insulation oil leaks and can catch fire.

However, it is very unusual for big substations like this to catch fire. One cause can be extreme weather such as lightning strikes, which could cause extreme high voltage on the equipment. Extreme hot weather together with high demand can also cause transformers to become overheated, thus leading to faults.

Another factor is the ageing of transformers. The insulation gas can degrade, which could cause an explosion inside a transformer. Or there could be a malfunction of other auxiliary devices such as the insulator, switch gears or circuit breakers inside the substation.

Other possible causes include a malicious attack on the substation – someone setting fire to it deliberately, for example. Cyber-attacks on IT systems can also cause a malfunction of devices in the substation, leading to fire.

Serious questions about Heathrow’s back-ups

Kirk Chang, professor of management and technology, University of East London

The airport lost power because of the fire – we understand that. But the back-up system didn’t work. It’s difficult to understand how that could happen.

There are two things we need to look at. Number one is the technical part. Why did the back-up machines not work? Maybe the machines did not have sufficient fuel, or for some reason the system was not linked to the grid. The backup should kick in immediately.

The second point is more the human side. Who is responsible for the power management, and what intervention strategies were attempted? I would assume they would need a second back-up system if the first fails. It’s very unusual to see both Plan A (the back-up) and Plan B (the back-up to the back-up) not working.

Usually, a main back-up (Plan A) will supply about 90% of the power the facility usually receives. Whereas Plan B will usually only supply a fraction of the power – maybe 50% or 30%. The reason is that Plan B is usually expensive to maintain all the time. It may be outsourced to a third party – either the power company or a software company which manages their power distribution network.

More than 1,300 flights were affected by Heathrow’s closure.
Tolga Akmen/EPA

Critical infrastructure arguably needs more security

Paul Cuffe, assistant professor, School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin

An airport like Heathrow requires a lot of electricity to operate, equivalent to a large town. As such, it would be typical for it to be given a dedicated connection from the substation at Hayes.

There is likely a dedicated power line and transformer there that connects the airport to the wider grid. When a major fire severs that link, it will no longer be possible to bring bulk electricity to the airport.

I would anticipate that a major airport like Heathrow would have some on-site emergency capability to ride through a grid disturbance. I would hope the traffic control tower and runway lights weren’t totally plunged into darkness!

However, processing planeloads of passengers requires Heathrow in its totality to consume a town’s worth of electricity, and the inability to meet this requirement is probably why the flights had to be cancelled.

The failure is not overtly abnormal. We can anticipate that, from time to time, substation equipment will fail and downstream power outages will result. But one could argue that a critical piece of national infrastructure like Heathrow deserves special grid connection arrangements to secure its supply of electricity further. For instance, sometimes critical loads like this are fed from two separate substations to provide redundancy when outages happen.

It is ultimately a political and economic question to determine the right level of capital investment into grid infrastructure to avoid the problems that outages like this cause. Redundant power supplies for an airport the size of Heathrow do not come free.

Climate change means the grid will face more threats like this

Hayley J. Fowler, professor of climate change impacts;
Colin Manning, postdoctoral research associate in climate science; and
Sean Wilkinson, professor of structural engineering, Newcastle University

The closure of one of the world’s largest airports due to a failure of just one electricity substation underlines how important it is that critical national energy infrastructure – pylons, substations and so on – keeps functioning. This is only becoming more important as demand for electricity increases, thanks to transport and domestic heating switching to lower-carbon electrified alternatives – notably electric cars and heat pumps.

Yet the UK’s energy system is facing growing threats from unprecedented risks. We still don’t know what caused the Heathrow fire, but it appears to be unusual in this regard, as threats to energy systems come mainly from extreme weather. In the UK, that tends to mean windstorms, flooding, heatwaves and associated wildfires, and cold spells.

2024 was the warmest calendar year on record, and the “fingerprints” of climate change are increasingly evident in more intense and frequent extreme weather events. It is crucial to ensure the energy network can handle this weather.

Gas and electricity operators in the UK have established protocols for managing networks in adverse weather, investing large amounts to protect critical assets. But recent events have exposed vulnerabilities. The storms Arwen and Éowyn left thousands without power for days, underscoring the previous UK government’s admission that the country is underprepared for extreme weather events.

Read more:
Heathrow fire shows just how vulnerable UK energy infrastructure is – we’ve simulated the major climate-related risks Läs mer…

The UK government is calling it the “biggest shakeup to the welfare system in a generation” – prompted by what the prime minister described as the “devastating” cost of sickness and disability benefits. Planned reforms to cut those costs are designed to save £5 billion a year by 2030, from a welfare budget that will reach £70 billion on current projections.

Similar warnings about unsustainable welfare payments can be heard in other countries struggling with the rising costs of social security, state pensions and subsidised healthcare.

Germany’s new chancellor thinks his country’s welfare system is wasteful and discourages full-time work. France, meanwhile, has been preparing for social security to absorb half the spending cuts it says it needs in 2025.

All of these social security funds collect contributions from the people enrolled in them, and pay out to those who retire or cannot work. Technically, some of them can reach a point of bankruptcy, when payouts become unaffordable – unless governments reduce entitlements or raise taxes.

In some cases, their solvency can be calculated using projections of future claims, employment levels and demographic trends. On present predictions, for example, the US social security fund will “go broke” between 2033 and 2035. The Trump administration, while denying it will cut benefits, is promising to trim the bill with a clampdown on “fraud and waste”.

The UK is slightly different because it does not put social security into a separate fund – so its sustainability depends on the overall state of public finance. But the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects an unsustainable acceleration of public debt growth from the late 2030s as the costs of welfare, public services and debt interest lift public spending towards 60% of GDP.

As welfare accounts for almost a third of public spending in 2024-5, it is inevitably a target when savings are needed. Put simply, if more working-age people take jobs and stay in them for longer, there will be extra funds available for those who genuinely cannot work or need additional income.

So, underlying the government’s stated motive of providing opportunities for people with sickness or disabilities is the Treasury’s agenda – of boosting economic growth while borrowing and spending less.

After all, current fiscal rules and growth prospects left the government little room for additional spending after last autumn’s budget. And now it wants to raise defence spending to 2.6% of GDP by 2027, so that £5 billion saving would certainly be useful.

The productivity problem

The projected savings come at a social cost, however. There is evidence, for example, of a genuine worsening of young people’s (especially mental) health, which could be further damaged by a forced move into inappropriate employment.

And personal independence payment (Pip) applications (which the government says have “skyrocketed” among the young) are already designed to help claimants find work. The proportion who do so has stayed steady at around one in six.

A rapid rise in benefit claims from younger people is one motivation for the reform plans. But they are likely to boost Pip claims by making it the basis of universal credit eligibility.

Productivity is the bigger issue.
AmbrosiniV/Shutterstock

And although ministers argue that an unusually high proportion of working-age people in Britain are not in employment, the participation rate of 16- to 64-year-olds (74.9%) is the same as it was in 2017, and comparable to other industrial countries.

Past efforts to move more people into work by restricting benefits have often hurt those who lose them, without expanding the available workforce in areas that employers most need.

It’s true that present arrangements leave some claimants in a “poverty trap”, where they are effectively penalised for getting a job or promotion, because the loss of means-tested benefits exceeds any gain in income.

The Department for Work and Pensions proposes tackling this with the right to try a job before eligibility is re-assessed. But Pip, designed to cover the extra costs of disability or chronic ill-health, is one of the few non-means-tested benefits that helps avoid these traps.

The argument that working-age participation must rise to support the growing number of retired people reflects the long-running inability of UK governments to get UK labour productivity growing again. OBR projections assume that hourly productivity growth will average 1.1% from 2025 to 2029, but it was zero in 2023-24. And there is no sign of any pick-up in the vital investment or innovation that might actually deliver this.

Output per UK worker has dropped since 2022, falling back to 2019 levels. And UK productivity growth since 2010 has been significantly slower than in the US, Germany or France.

The UK government is looking keenly at new technology, especially AI, to streamline its own service delivery so as to reduce public sector costs. But current fiscal problems stem from the slow growth of private sector productivity. Compelling more people to work – especially when in fragile health – could erode this even further. Läs mer…

London’s Heathrow Airport has been forced to close temporarily after a fire in a nearby electricity substation. More than 1,300 flights have been suspended and thousands of passengers left stranded.

Substations take high-voltage electricity from pylons and transform it into the lower voltages you use at home. This happens in a transformer filled with oil to insulate the electricity. In this case, it appears that more than 20,000 litres of this oil caught fire.

The closure of one of the world’s largest airports due to a failure of just one electricity substation underlines how important it is that critical national energy infrastructure – pylons, substations and so on – keeps functioning. This is only becoming more important as demand for electricity increases, thanks to transport and domestic heating switching to lower-carbon electrified alternatives – notably electric cars and heat pumps.

Yet the UK’s energy system is facing growing threats from unprecedented risks. We still don’t know what caused the Heathrow fire, but it appears to be unusual in this regard, as threats to energy systems come mainly from extreme weather. In the UK, that tends to mean windstorms, flooding, heatwaves and associated wildfires, and cold spells.

Stranded passengers at Heathrow Airport, March 21 2025.
Kin Cheung / Alamy

2024 was the warmest calendar year on record, and the “fingerprints” of climate change are increasingly evident in more intense and frequent extreme weather events. It is crucial to ensure the energy network can handle this weather.

Gas and electricity operators in the UK have established protocols for managing networks in adverse weather, investing large amounts to protect critical assets. But recent events have exposed vulnerabilities. The storms Arwen and Éowyn left thousands without power for days, underscoring the previous UK government’s admission that the country is underprepared for extreme weather events.

Major hazards to UK energy infrastructure

As part of a UK government research programme on climate vulnerability, we identified four major climate hazards that affect the UK’s energy infrastructure. We then used high-resolution climate simulations to assess how these hazards would change in a worst-case scenario, where the world keeps emitting greenhouse gases as usual.

Windstorms: These are projected to increase in severity, especially in northern and western regions of the UK, posing risks to overhead power lines.

Hot spells: Extreme heat of 35°C or more, once rare, could happen every other year by the 2060s. This will strain electricity networks as buildings and pipes need to be cooled, while efficiency will be reduced and transformers may be damaged.

Cold spells: The most extreme cold weather will happen less often as the world warms. But the climate will become more variable, causing more sudden temperature shifts which may challenge energy distribution and demand management.

Flooding: Higher-intensity rainfall, particularly in winter, will increase the risk of flooded substations and gas pressure reduction stations. The former has led to large power outages.

This worst-case emissions scenario probably won’t happen, as the world is currently on a better trajectory. Nonetheless our results, alongside observed consequences of past events, underscore the need to safeguard the UK’s energy system against increasing climate threats.

Making the UK energy system more resilient

We propose several strategies to make UK energy infrastructure more resilient. Importantly, energy operators, policymakers and regulators should adopt a system-wide approach, as failures in one area can cascade across the entire network and affect other critical infrastructure. The Heathrow closure perfectly illustrates this.

Our report promotes adaptation measures that are currently available and will be beneficial regardless of future climate changes.

For instance, we could strengthen and protect vulnerable network assets like substations and power lines to better withstand extreme weather. This might involve building flood defences around substations or raising them off the ground, undergrounding critical overhead lines, and protecting infrastructure vulnerable to falling trees blown over during windstorms.

We could use smart sensors and predictive analytics to monitor things like power lines and detect failures early. We could minimise disruptions during extreme weather by getting better at forecasting, and by improving rapid response capabilities. And we could further encourage off-peak energy use, to ease grid stress during extreme weather.

To build a resilient UK energy network, we need better tools to quantify and simulate climate risks, ensuring decision-making is based on robust scientific evidence.

We also urgently need new resilience metrics and standards. While guidelines such as ETR 138 exist for flood resilience, there is a lack of equivalent standards for other climate hazards such as windstorms or extreme heat. These standards help identify critical assets and parts of the network most in need of further protection.

The UK’s transition to net zero emissions should consider climate resilience as a priority. Investments in renewable energy infrastructure, battery storage and smart grids should incorporate resilience assessments from the outset.

We should also consider providing generators or other ways to produce energy at highly vulnerable locations where it is of critical need, including hospitals and airports such as Heathrow.

Finally, the energy sector needs to work closely with other critical infrastructure operators – such as transport, water and telecommunications – to mitigate cascading risks and ensure a coordinated response to extreme weather events. We’re part of a project that has begun to do this for transport. But resilience strategies should be extended to consider risks from climate, cyber-attacks, asset failures and extreme energy demand.

While the fire and power cut at Heathrow was not related to extreme weather, it highlights the consequences of such failures. By acting now, we can safeguard the UK’s energy networks against unprecedented extreme weather and ensure a secure, reliable and sustainable energy system for generations to come. Läs mer…

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for the democratisation of many eastern European countries and triumphantly ushered in the era of global liberal democracy that some scholars celebrated as “the end of history”. The idea was that human political history followed a steady path and that western liberal democracy was the end point of the evolution of human government. Unfortunately, events unfolded a little differently.

The last 20 years did not follow a linear arc of progress, let alone marked the end of history. The growing electoral success of extreme rightwing parties in many western countries, from France to Finland and from the Netherlands to Germany, has turned the end of history into the possible end of democracy.

What is prompting so many Europeans to turn away from a political system that has successfully rebuilt the continent after the second world war and transformed it into the world’s most prosperous single market?

The reasons are manifold, ranging from economic crises and rising inequality to the negative impact of social media on political behaviour and breaches of democratic norms by elites. But there is another driver that is rarely discussed: the power of personal experience.

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Over the past two decades, behavioural scientists have extensively explored how our actions are driven by our experiences. The pain, pleasure, rewards, losses, information and knowledge that arise from living through events help us evaluate our past actions and inform future ones.

A positive experience that is associated with a particular option increases the likelihood of that option being chosen again; a negative experience has the opposite effect. Mapping people’s experiences – especially in response to life’s risks – can illuminate otherwise perplexing risky behaviour such as people building homes on flood plains, in regions with high seismic risk or at the foot of an active volcano.

The last violent eruption of Vesuvius, Europe’s “ticking time bomb”, occurred 81 years ago. Vesuvius is considered one of the highest-risk volcanoes in the world. Nonetheless, some 700,000 residents live in the “red zone” at its foot, apparently disregarding the dire warnings from volcanologists.

To comprehend this complacency in the face of possible Armageddon, one must analyse individual and collective experience with the risk in question. Most residents in the red zone have never personally experienced Mount Vesuvius erupting. Their personal experience, day in and day out, likely reassures them with a sense of “all clear”.

Numerous psychological experiments have confirmed how this everyday behaviour can emerge. Our experience tends to underweight and underestimate the likelihood and impact of rare events for the very reason that they are rare.

Extremely rare and catastrophic events, especially in the financial market, have been called black swan events. Neglecting their possibility has contributed to insufficient banking regulation and catastrophic financial meltdowns such as the global financial crisis in 2008.

People in western Europe have experienced democracy and growing posterity for more than 70 years. They have been spared, up to now, the experience of autocratic takeovers and therefore may underestimate the risk of democratic collapse.

Paradoxically, the very success of democratic systems may thus also sow the seeds of their potential undoing. This is a phenomenon akin to the paradox of disease prevention, where the success of preventive measures such as childhood vaccinations may undermine their perceived need, thus increasing complacency and vaccine hesitancy.

A further ominous connection exists between the erosion of a democratic system and the experiences of its citizens. As history has shown, democracies do not suddenly go up in flames. Democracies tend to die slowly, one stab at a time, until a tipping point is reached.

The public is unlikely to perceive a risk to democracy when a political leader breaks with a convention. But when repeated breaches of democratic norms by political elites are tolerated, when rhetorical transgressions escalate, and when a deluge of lies and manipulative claims becomes “normal”, then the public’s failure to punish the early signs of such behaviour at the ballot box may have drastic consequences.

In the same way that a nuclear power plant may appear to be operating safely until the last safety valve is broken, democracies can appear stable right up until they flip into autocracy.

The more we tolerate, the more we will have to tolerate.
Alamy/DACameron

One way to counter these problems may be to simulate experience of the risks, even if only through proxies. For instance, disaster training centres in Japan simulate the experience of the visceral dimensions of an earthquake and its swift temporal dynamic in a way that even the most graphic warnings cannot.

We argue that we can, equally, simulate how life feels in an authoritarian regime. Europe is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have lived in autocracies and who can be invited to classrooms to share their personal experiences.

Vicarious detailed experiences can be highly persuasive. Similarly, people can gain insight into what it meant to be a political prisoner by visiting places like the former Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, especially when the guide is a former inmate. There are numerous other ways to emulate the experience of oppression and authoritarianism, thereby informing those who have been fortunate enough never to endure it.

The seemingly persistent non-occurrences of risky events can be seductive and misleading. But we are not enslaved by what we haven’t yet experienced. We can also use the positive power of experience to protect and appreciate our democratic systems. Läs mer…

Legend has it that William Tell shot an apple from his young son’s head. While there are many interpretations of the tale, from the perspective of the theory of technology, a few are especially salient.

First, Tell was an expert marksman. Second, he knew his bow was reliable but understood it was just a tool with no independent agency. Third, Tell chose the target.

What does all this have to do with artificial intelligence? Metaphorically, AI (think large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT) can be thought of as a bow, the user is the archer, and the apple represents the user’s goal. Viewed this way, it’s easier to work out how AI can be used effectively in the workplace.

To that end, it’s helpful to consider what is known about the limitations of AI before working out where it can – and can’t – help with efficiency and productivity.

First, LLMs tend to create outcomes that are not tethered in reality. A recent study showed that as much as 60% of their answers can be incorrect. Premium versions even incorrectly answer questions more confidently than their free counterparts.

Second, some LLMs are closed systems – that is, they do not update their “beliefs”. In a mutable world that is constantly changing, the static nature of such LLMs can be misleading. In this sense, they drift away from reality and may not be reliable.

What’s more, there is some evidence that interactions with users lead to a degradation in performance. For example, researchers have found that LLMs become more covertly racist over time. Consequently, their output is not predictable.

Third, LLMs have no goals and are not capable of independently discovering the world. They are, at best, just tools to which a user can outsource their exploration of the world.

Finally, LLMs do not – to borrow a term from the 1960s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land – “grok” (understand) the world they are embedded in. They are far more like jabbering parrots that give the impression of being smart.

Think of the ability of LLMs to mine data and consider statistical associations between words, which they use to mimic human speech. The AI does not know what statistical association between words mean. It does not know that the crowing of the rooster does not lead to a sunrise, for example.

Of course, an LLM’s ability to mimic speech is impressive. But the ability to mimic something does not mean it has the attributes of the original.

Lightening the workload

So how can you use AI more effectively? One thing it can be useful for is critiquing ideas. Very often, people prefer not to hear criticism and feel a loss of face when their ideas are criticised – especially when it happens in public.

But LLM-generated critiques are private matters and can be useful. I have done so for a recent essay and found the critique reasonable. Pre-testing ideas can also help avoid blind spots and obvious errors.

Second, you can use AI to crystallise your understanding of the world. What does this mean? Well, because AI does not understand the causes of events, asking it questions can force you to engage in sense-making. For example, I asked an LLM about whether my university (Bath) should widely adopt the use of AI.

While the LLM pointed to efficiency advantages, it clearly did not understand how resource are allocated. For example, administrative staff who are freed up cannot be redeployed to make high-level strategic decisions or teach courses. AI has no experience in the world to understand that.

Third, AI can be used to complement mundane tasks such as editing and writing emails. But here, of course, lies a danger – users will use LLMs to write emails at one end and summarise emails at the other.

You should consider when a clumsily written personal email might be a better option (especially if you need to persuade someone about something). Authenticity is likely to start counting more as the use of LLMs becomes more widespread. A personal email that uses the right language and appeals to shared values is more likely to resonate.

Fourth, AI is best used for low-stakes tasks where there is no liability. For example, it could be used to summarise a lengthy customer review, answer customer questions that are not related to policy or finance, generate social media posts, or help with employee inductions.

Where decisions might have serious consequences, human input is better.
M Stocker/Shutterstock

Consider the opposite case. In 2022, an LLM used by Air Canada misinformed a passenger about a fee – and the passenger sued. The judge held the airline liable for the bad advice. So always think about liability issues.

Fans of AI often advocate it for everything under the sun. Yet frequently, AI comes across as a solution looking for a problem. The trick is to consider very carefully if there is a case for using AI and what the costs involved might be.

Chances are, the more creative your task is, or the more unique it is, and the more understanding it requires of how the world works, the less likely it is that AI will be useful. In fact, outsourcing creative work to AI can take away some of the “magic”. AI can mimic humans – but only humans “grok” what it is to be human. Läs mer…