At 2am last Sunday, as the temperature dropped below zero, a four-week-old baby was pulled out of the English Channel, clinging to life. Alongside, a pregnant woman with advanced hypothermia was rescued and admitted to hospital. Four people were found dead in the water; another body washed up hours later. All had been trying to cross the Channel to reach the UK.

Today, just three days later, we have the spectacle of the Conservative party voting to prevent people from claiming asylum in the UK. Instead, applicants will be flown to Rwanda to try their luck there, a country that the Government’s Bill declares safe—contrary to the view of the Supreme Court.

Rishi Sunak calls this ‘an effective deterrent’ to crossing the Channel. For this to be true, the possibility of living safely in Rwanda must be a fate more grave than the possibility of watching your newborn baby drown in freezing seawater in the dead of night. As Sophy Ridge might say: “I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but you can’t possibly believe that, can you?”

The Home Office has suggested that most of those who come to the UK in small boats are likely to have valid asylum claims. They are genuinely fleeing for their lives, and the rules allow them to resettle in the UK. In 2021, the then Home Secretary elected to lie about this, falsely claiming that ‘70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants’. No apology has been forthcoming.

The man who was, until last night, deputy chair of the Conservative Party, says that asylum seekers ought to ‘fuck off back to France’. He pretends not to understand that the UK’s asylum laws are more generous than those in France. In the UK, more than 80% of asylum claims are successful; in France, more than 80% are rejected.

The Rwanda plan maintains the UK rules, cements the underlying calculation and boosts the business model of people traffickers: risking life by crossing the Channel still offers the best hope by far for asylum seekers to be allowed to resettle in a country where they are safe from persecution.

There is a simple way to ‘stop the boats’—or, more accurately, to stop frightened, persecuted people risking their lives. Dangerous crossings of the Channel in small boats are unnecessary, a product solely of Government cruelty: we have ferries and a tunnel. The Government could allow people to apply for asylum before they arrive. If successful, the Government could provide safe passage. Instead, the Government prefers to continue with a system under which the only way that people can claim asylum is by coming to the UK, a fact which literally requires small boat crossings and on which the entire business model of human traffickers across the Channel depends.

Moving to offshore applications wouldn’t be easy: it’s hard for someone who is fleeing persecution to fill in forms and engage with bureaucracy. It would need to be a caring, supportive, accessible, approachable, thoughtfully designed service. It would probably be expensive. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives support this approach.

It takes only a passing acquaintance with history to understand that regret most often stems from treating people unkindly and inhumanely, not the converse. This isn’t a difficult long-term call, but the state of our politics means it’s not necessarily an electorally expedient one.

The politically astute thing for the Conservative party would have been to couple offshore applications with the Rwanda scheme: let people apply before reaching the UK and be given passage straight to Rwanda if successful, or passage to the UK if extenuating circumstances apply. It would still be an appallingly inhumane derogation of international law, but it would have been far more likely actually to stop dangerous crossings.

Instead, we’re invited to believe that the Prime Minister believes that living in Rwanda is a fate worse than death.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This book is the story of social media, but rather than concentrating on the platforms themselves, it focuses on the most popular users. This struck me as a good idea: we wouldn’t, for example, try to tell the history of cinema without including the film stars who drew in audiences in the first place, so why are the star attractions often missing from the history of social media?

In Taylor’s own words,

Extremely Online offers a social history of social media.

Having read the book, it turns out that the problem is that social media stars just aren’t that interesting. Honestly, there is only so much I wanted to know about ‘Grumpy Cat’ and Lorenz vastly over-delivers. Even after Lorenz’s four-page explanation, I don’t understand the wider relevance of ‘Dramageddon’, an incident in which some YouTubers famed for make-up tutorials fell out with one another.

Lorenz’s research also often feels limited: it’s as though she buys into the hype a little too much. Grumpy Cat’s story also provides an excellent example of this flaw. Lorenz writes:

In 2016, she joined the cast of the Broadway musical Cats.

This left me wondering: how could a cat play a meaningful role in Cats? A few minutes of searching online reveals that this event was heavily promoted as such, talked up as a ‘Broadway debut’, but turned out to amount to being a ‘guest of honour’ at a single performance. That doesn’t amount to ‘joining the cast’ in any offline, reality-based view of the world, and it’s disappointing that Lorenz reported it in that way.

I enjoyed some sections and observations in Extremely Online. I hadn’t previously considered the argument that the lowering of production standards in television which necessarily accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic—chat shows filmed on Zoom from hosts’ homes, for example—helped online content with similarly low standards to become more mainstream.

I’m left with a better appreciation for the effort and professionalism of people who create social media content and the loyalty they come to command within their audience. Yet, I’d have preferred an analysis which considered the broader societal impact of this new form of celebrity rather than viewing it only on its own over-hyped terms.

Frankly, this book was not what I anticipated, and it failed to pique my interest as much as I had hoped. It might resonate with those deeply entrenched in social media culture, but I question its relevance to a wider audience.

Having recently seen Connecting Histories, This botanical art installation by Michael Rakowitz ought to have held particular resonance. Like Connecting Histories, there’s a plant-based exploration of colonialism. However, The Waiting Gardens of the North intends to reflect current, rather than historical, experiences.

By planting a ‘garden’ in which different plants are at different stages of the life cycle, Rakowitz intends to explore the strange ‘pause’ in life caused by waiting for asylum applications to be processed: a time when people are caught between the past and an uncertain future.

The central feature of the installation is a collage made of food packaging from local West Asian, South Asian and African grocery stores.

But honestly, I’m telling you most of that from reading the interpretation panels. I don’t think I’d have derived it for myself in a month of Sundays. Wendy commented that it felt like wandering around a particularly good garden department in a branch of B&Q, and I find it hard to disagree.

The nature of art means that, sometimes, the artist’s vision for an installation won’t meaningfully connect with some viewers. This was the case for me with this one. I don’t think I would ever have appreciated that Rakowitz was aiming for ‘a metaphorical space where the potential for growth, transformation, and resistance can take root.’

But that’s okay because I’m sure some viewers will love it.

The Waiting Gardens of the North continues at Baltic until 26 May.

Some weeks, I think more about local journalism. This has been one of those weeks, as I’ve been thinking quite hard with my comms colleagues at work about whether and how to include public health messages in statements relating to a minor local news story. It’s sometimes a trickier call than you’d think.

When I saw James O’Malley’s most recent Substack post was about saving local news, the topic was already on my mind. He suggests that local news might be sustainably delivered through ‘paywalled newsletters’, initially supported by the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) funds, which currently pay for local newspaper journalists.

In an instant, this would mean that many more pockets of the country once again have quality reporting in a quality publication, covering the nuts and bolts of their local democracy. And with a LDRS subsidy, it would mitigate the chicken-and-egg problem that newsletters have, of needing to sign up enough people to be viable while still paying the wages of the writers.

Over time, some newsletters might even become profitable or sustainable – like the Mill. Others may need to be subsidised for slightly longer.

But ultimately, it would stimulate an ecosystem of viable local newsletters, with the reach and distribution to serve communities with real, meaningful news – with all of the civic positive-externalities that implies: Better democracy, better accountability, and better media.

As I read this, I immediately thought this was both a brilliant and terrible idea, and I haven’t entirely managed to reconcile my thoughts on it since.

The downside is, of course, the paywall. I’m not sure that content whose accessibility is limited to a few paid subscribers really does deliver better democracy or accountability. At the very least, it’s harder to counter misinformation and disinformation that is not out in the open in the first place. I’m also not confident that it’s ethically sound to use LRDS public money to fund journalism that’s only—or at least preferentially—available to those willing to pay a subscription fee.

And yet, if a product like that existed locally, I wouldn’t hesitate to sign up, so I’m not that ethically opposed to it. Heck, I even subscribe to the apps of some local newspapers so that I can view the less ridiculous content without a deluge of advertising. And surely a sustainable future for local journalism, even if it is a little less open, is better than no local journalism at all?

It’s a quandary.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery isn’t an immediately obvious place to host an exhibition of photographs of architecture, but there is an exciting resonance here. While the rest of the building is dedicated to representations of people, this exhibition comments on how physical space impacts people’s lives.

You don’t need a medical degree, nor even a Victoria Wood sketch of a medical school interview, to know that architecture can have a lasting impact on the life changes of individuals: poor housing exacerbates health inequalities, for example. Perhaps because of my profession, it was Chris Leslie’s photographs of Glasgow which particularly caught my eye.

We all know how the city’s 1960s towerblocks of ‘urban renewal’ turned out not to be a lasting solution, with many of the blocks being demolished after as little as forty years. It’s the backstory to any number of novels I’ve read in recent years if nothing else! Yet Leslie’s work brings home the human aspect of transforming the city’s landscape in a way that other representations haven’t. There is something about documentary photography that brings home the folly of the timescale and the impact of the displacement. It also made me wonder about the appalling ecological footprint of the schemes.

Leslie’s photograph Bird Man of Red Road drew out the social exclusion of the last residents of many of the flats, asylum seekers. I didn’t know of that particular temporary afterlife of the blocks, and it adds another strand to their story.

There was much more to contemplate in the exhibition, including a dizzying large-print photograph of a San Francisco lobby by Andreas Gursky, but I know that Leslie’s work will stay with me.

Making Space continues at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery until 3 March.

On Sunday, the country was subject to the ignominy of our Prime Minister standing next to a flood and talking about how his Government had spent £5.2bn on flood defences—as he put it, ‘overall investment that’s going into flood defences is at a very, very high level’.

I don’t know what reaction this was intended to provoke, but it’s hard to believe that anyone who witnessed the spectacle didn’t think, ‘Well, it’s not bloody working, is it?’

This would be a slightly unfair conclusion—Government investment in flood defences protected thousands of homes—but the choice of imagery is baffling to the point of incompetence.

King Cnut is often maligned as believing he could use his power to stop the tide from coming in, whereas the legend is actually that he commanded the sea to retreat as a demonstration of his own lack of power. There is a hint of the, shall we say, ‘silly’ version of the Cnut story in standing in a flooded area and talking about the billions the Government has spent on avoiding that very fate.

Of course, the heavy periods of rain which cause this sort of flooding will only increase as we further corrupt Earth’s climate. A warmer atmosphere means more evaporation which means more rain: I don’t need to rehearse the water cycle for you, though basic scientific principles are sometimes a challenge for senior politicians.

Sunak’s decision to pour cold water on the UK’s net zero strategy also guarantees pouring floodwater into people’s kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms.

For example, over 80% of new cars sold in Norway are now electric; sales of petrol and diesel cars will be banned next year. Rishi Sunak refuses to aim for the same here even within a decade.

When Sunak expels hot air in claiming that the UK is ‘leading the world’ on climate change, it neither makes it true nor dries anyone’s flooded home. It only serves to underline his disconnect from the reality the rest of us face.

It’s a reflection of my own cultural biases that when reflecting on the impact of colonialism and the British Empire on botany, of all things, my mind leaps to the introduction of species to the UK. Plants such as fuchsias, geraniums and petunias arrived on our shores through a complex and uncomfortable web of international relations.

This exhibition made me think for the first time about how the movement of species is more complicated than things reaching British gardens. Empire introduced coffee and tobacco to India, for example, which I would ignorantly have assumed were native to India.

But this exhibition is really about reckoning with part of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s colonial history. Its collection includes a significant number of botanical drawings by Indian artists commissioned by Scottish doctors employed by the East India Company. Doctors, of course, because the Garden’s primary function was medical. Very little is known about any of the artists: in many cases, not even their names.

This exhibition of their drawings, therefore, becomes not only an appreciation of their inherent beauty and accuracy but also a sad reflection. It reminds the visitor with marvellous clarity of the way that the Empire often failed to recognise the personhood of those on whose remarkable skills and talents it relied.

Connecting histories continues at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh until 14 April.

I read Ben Fergusson’s translation of this book. The original spent almost a year as one of the bestselling books in Germany. For about the first third of the book, I couldn’t understand why: it seemed a bit dry and dull. But this is one of those books which suddenly ‘clicked’ for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed the remainder.

The book is a collection of reflections on solitary living and the importance of friendship. Many of Schreiber’s thoughts are inspired by his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced more people than ever into a state of solitude.

I’ve written previously about my concern that the public health imperative to tackle loneliness risks threatening the benefits of solitude. This has personal relevance to me, as I enjoy a bit of solitude and time spent in my own company. Schreiber’s discussion draws neat distinctions between the two, which I found helpful. I also thought his reflection on how politicians sometimes use ‘loneliness’ as an excuse to push traditional, outdated social values was insightful: I’d never clocked that before.

Schreiber also touches on his experience of depression, albeit somewhat indirectly. Towards the end of the book, he touches on the idea that treatments for depression often focus on promoting a sense of self-efficacy. Schreiber notes that, actually, there is quite a lot in the world that we can’t control, and each of us carries a burden of goals that we know we’re unlikely ever to achieve. He argues that accepting a lack of self-efficacy is, therefore, just as important. I found this insightful: it felt like an equivalent of the loneliness versus solitude debate in a different area of life altogether.

I felt like this book prompted a lot of valuable reflections, and it’s one which I think will continue to provide food for thought for some time to come.

Some highlights:

How can one mourn losses that are ambiguous? How can we say goodbye to what we ourselves find difficult just to name? We want grief to be finite, to have, at some point, an end, but in truth, we grieve, continue our lives, grieve again, grieve anew, continue to grieve, and sometimes losses can be so ambiguous that our grief has no end.

I think that writers like walking so much because it is a good remedy for the dark state of mind that catches up with you, whether you like it or not, when you are working alone at your desk. It is not uncommonly the case that the great depressives of literary history have also been the most enthusiastic hikers.

When you do nothing but put one foot in front of the other, your mind seems to seek new paths. Body, mind and world come together in a new way, open up new conversations.

As the seasons progressed, I often couldn’t say for sure which day, week or even month it was. Somewhere along the line, I stopped noticing how nature was changing around me. It was as if my life had been packed in cotton wool, as if I was stuck in a dense fog that only parted at certain moments to reveal what was actually happening to and around me. One day I noticed that the summer heat had dried everything out, turned the grass yellow and wilted the birch trees. At some later moment in time, I suddenly registered that the drops on my mackintosh felt cooler than usual and that autumn was on its way. At some point I seemed to wake up on one of those walks to find that the leaves on most of the trees had turned and the first crowns were bare.

But, often, these discussions about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ simply mask a wistful longing for the good old times, for traditional social models of marriage and family that for many of us have outlived their relevance. Often, behind these discussions, is a political agenda that fails to recognize our social realities. Significantly, each revival of the prophets of social decline fails to propose that we start fighting loneliness by tackling racism, misogyny, ableism, antisemitism, homo-, trans- and Islamophobia, by addressing the social stigmatization of people living in poverty, all the structural phenomena of exclusion that produce social isolation every day and on a vast scale. The response of those who employ these grand warnings is almost always to invoke the magical power of the nuclear family.

The truth is that even painful emotions can gift us something. It is hard to see this at the time. When one is caught up in them and is doing everything one can to avoid them, one feels, of course, that one would be better off without them. But they often teach us things that we wouldn’t otherwise have learnt.