It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Red Cross report finds Ukrainians face uncertainty, homelessness, and potential exploitation in the UK
Pic: Pix-4-2-Day (Flickr)
Author: Halle Dolce
A report from the Red Cross released yesterday has found that displaced people from Ukraine in the UK face continued uncertainty about their futures and that ‘too many’ have experienced precarious housing and homelessness in the UK. Previous research from the British Red Cross has found that Ukrainians were over four times more likely to experience homelessness than the general population.
The report identifies that housing difficulties have arisen due to relationship breakdowns between Ukrainian refugees and their hosts, in part caused by insufficient training for host families, increasing pressures caused by the cost-of-living, and the guests needing to stay longer than had been initially anticipated due to a lack of alternative options.
The report also found that weaknesses in safeguarding had left Ukrainian people vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Some concerning examples identified in the Guardian article included: people being made homeless by host families at short notice leaving them with nowhere to go; one woman who was offered accommodation that had been set up for sexual exploitation with a lock on the outside of the door and video cameras in the bedroom; examples of families being forced to share extremely small rooms and/or beds; and some individuals who had extreme difficulties finding accommodation.
The Red Cross is calling for vast improvements regarding accommodation schemes for Ukrainian refugees in the UK. In addition, they seek aid provided towards displaced refugees to access the private rented sector, and an increase of affordable housing. These improvements are hoped to provide durable, long-term solutions.
The executive director of communications and external affairs at the British Red Cross, Sal Copley, has explained that, whilst the UK became a place of safety for Ukrainian’s over two years ago, ‘that safety has not always offered the stability people need to rebuild their lives.’ She continued: ‘Too many families have ended up sleeping rough or living in places where they have felt unsafe. This has had a damaging impact on mental health and wellbeing. We need to improve the support available for Ukrainians here in the UK and learn from the Ukraine schemes so we can create more effective safe routes in the future.’
The Justice Gap is an online magazine about the law and justice run by journalists. read more...
Halle Dolce is a Justice Gap reporter and a rising third-year majoring in Criminology and Spanish at the University of Florida, with a future aim to attend Law school. Halle has a particular interest in wrongful conviction and would hope to work with an innocence project in the future to help right the wrongs of the justice system.
‘Fortune-Teller’, by Andries Stock after Jacques de Gheyn II, c. 1608. Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.
When most people – and perhaps most historians – think of magic and its practitioners in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the twin images that come to mind are likely to be those of the witch and the learned magus. In popular culture the person accused of witchcraft (usually a woman) is a figure of pity or fascination, while the overreaching and over-learned magus is a character open to derision. But as Tabitha Stanmore expertly shows in Cunning Folk, magic was a more complex field of activity – and indeed business – than these limited stereotypes will allow. Men and women who were neither liable to be accused of witchcraft, nor learned like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa or John Dee, made their living from the practice of magic. These ‘service magicians’ are the subjects of Stanmore’s eye-opening book, which lays bare the grubby and transactional – yet relatably human – world of late medieval and early modern England’s cunning folk.
Tabitha Stanmore has already done more than anyone to advance our knowledge of service magicians in the last decade with her book Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2022); Cunning Folk brings the insights gleaned from her unrivalled knowledge of the primary sources to a broader audience. While previous historians have focused on some of the better-known service magicians themselves – the notorious Jacobean wizard Simon Forman, for example – Stanmore concentrates on the human stories of the clients of these magicians, and on the types of magic they employed. While many of these people were surely charlatans, the typical figure who emerges from Stanmore’s meticulous research is often something more like a sort of proto-therapist: experienced men and women with a hard-won and refined understanding of human psychology who restored hope to the desperate. In a society where even clergy, after the Reformation, increasingly withdrew from a ministry of reassuring their flock by demonstrations of sacred power, these individuals acted as a last resort for the resolution of apparently insoluble problems.
The question of whether the magic of these cunning folk did or did not work is one that Stanmore – necessarily, perhaps – declines to answer: ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there.’ But what we can say is that people kept coming back to seasoned professionals who built up successful businesses and local, regional and even national reputations. Clearly, these individuals were delivering what people wanted. Perhaps the best service magicians had the wisdom to realise that their clients were not really seeking the restoration of lost valuables, the name of a thief, or the love of a man or woman, but rather a sense of control over otherwise uncontrollable features of their lives. In the same way that religion promised the bounty of an inscrutable God who did not always deliver, so magic offered to make sense of the world – not as a rival to religion (for it was often deeply enmeshed in it), but as a pragmatic approach to the spiritual world that dealt with mundane matters of no interest to theology. Both religion and magic belonged to a worldview suffused with the supernatural where the efficacy – or potential efficacy – of spiritual technologies went without saying.
Stanmore’s book is structured around the most common longings expressed by the clients of service magicians: the search for lost goods and thieves, the search for love, the search for justice (‘How to Win at Trial’), the search for revenge, measures against witchcraft, the search for wealth, the search for power and the desire to know the future. It is a structure that mirrors that of the grimoires the magicians themselves used, which were usually a hotchpotch of ‘experiments’ for satisfying the most common desires of the magician or of his or her clients. While service magic in late medieval England was often the domain of the clergy – who, after all, were already conduits of sacred power – the Reformation brought a dramatic ‘deregulation’ of supernatural power which saw men and women fulfilling a demand no longer met by priests. In this respect, the cunning folk are a fascinating window on the growth of literacy and the diffusion of learning to a burgeoning lower middle or upper labouring class. While some cunning folk were illiterate, most were not and were in possession of manuscripts referencing such recondite works as the Picatrix (a medieval Arabic compendium of lunar magic). Many were also skilled mathematicians, capable of casting horoscopes. Indeed, the cunning folk could almost be said to have stood outside the boundaries of class – consulting for everyone from the poorest who could pay them to the wealthiest in the land.
This social fluidity of the figure of the wise woman or wizard surely reflected the universality of the human concerns they dealt with. While a duchess might not have been troubled by the loss of some spoons, the matter of fertility was just as important to the royal family as it was to the humblest labourer, while sinister forms of magic directed towards dispatching unwanted rivals became a valuable commodity at court. Magic had little to do with morality, and often seems to have existed in a grey area of ethics. But where churchmen, physicians and lawyers could not help, service magicians filled in the gaps as technicians of the impossible.
Cunning Folk gives a human face to magic in medieval and early modern England, bringing us closer than ever to the hopes, dreams and aspirations of both clients and practitioners. Like every other service industry, magic was at times a mercenary business, and many of the records we have arise from complaints brought by dissatisfied customers. But it is hard to conclude that service magicians did more harm than good. As Stanmore observes of the clients of cunning folk: ‘Instead of succumbing to the hopelessness they felt, they turned to magic – and, in doing so, they chose to hope.’
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic Tabitha Stanmore Bodley Head, 288pp, £20 Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Francis Young is the author of Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
UK
Five reasons to welcome Labour’s plans on public services
16 July 2024
Labour has promised “the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation”. We welcome this commitment, but what does it mean?
Over the last 14 years we’ve all seen what happens when public services are run by private companies hungry for profit. Whether it’s the scandalous behaviour of the water companies, the wholesale degradation of a 500-year old institution like Royal Mail, the preventable deaths of 557 people linked to outsourcing in the NHS, or the chronic underperformance of contractors like Serco, the private sector has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to run our vital public services.
It’s been obvious for quite some time that both the public, and the councils that serve them, benefit when public services are brought in house. The most recent report from the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) shows that 3 out of 4 UK councils were planning to bring services in-house in 2019. According to the report, 78% of local authorities say insourcing gives them more flexibility, two-thirds say it saves them money, and over half say it has improved the quality of the service while simplifying how it is managed.
So it’s good to see a commitment to end outsourcing in Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay; and, linked to this, in Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s letter to local authorities inviting them to take on more autonomy. From our point of view, this is definitely the right way to go.
Here are our five reasons why:
It’s a better deal for the public purse - outsourcing means we waste money on shareholder profits and the costs of managing inflexible contracts.
Less risk, greater control because when outsourcing goes wrong - like it did so spectacularly with the collapse of Carillion - it’s national and local government who have to pick up the pieces, usually with a hefty price tag attached.
Fair conditions for workers - outsourcing means making profits at the expense of workers’ rights and job security. Bringing services in house means workers should have decent employment, terms and conditions, improving their lives and their morale.
It keeps spending in the local economy - Instead of funnelling money to multinational corporations who will extract as much as they can, we can keep wealth in our communities through bringing council services in house. For example: in 2018 Stoke-on-Trent City Council ended a housing maintenance contract with a national provider on the grounds that local residents were getting poor service that didn’t offer value for money. It formed its own services provider, which purchases 78% of its goods from within Stoke postcodes. It’s now better placed to deliver a good service by using local supply chains, which in turn recycles spend into the local economy, as well as improving service quality.
Public accountability - Labour’s proposals include extending Freedom of Information requests to private companies that hold public service contracts, and public consultation when these services come up for tender. But we think the concept of public accountability and oversight should go further (in fact, we’ve been campaigning for this for 10 years!). We’ve already set out an example of a supervisory governing board for Thames Water, which would include customers making decisions alongside councils and trade experts. This model could work just as well at the council level when services are brought in house.
BUT - and it’s a big but - if councils are going to run services directly they need to be given the capacity to do so. Our councils have been desperately underfunded for years, and the number of public amenities we have lost as a result runs into the tens of thousands. Local government grant has plummeted 40% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20. One in five councils report they are on the brink of declaring bankruptcy.
The new government must invest in councils and local public services to get the best deal for citizens, communities and the economy. We know it’s early days for Labour, but if they stick to their commitments on public services then they will have got off to a good start.
Share this blog and help show Labour why they need to move forward with services that work for people not profit.
“Labour will learn the lessons from the collapse of Carillion and bring about the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation. A Labour government will end the Tories’ ideological drive to privatise our public services”...
“The next Labour government will also examine public services that have been outsourced as part of our drive to improve quality, design better services to meet changing needs, ensure greater stability and longer-term investment in the workforce, and deliver better value for money”....
“In most cases, the best time to achieve value for money for publicly run provision will be when existing contracts expire or are broken through a failure to deliver. Before any service is contracted out, public bodies must carry out a quick and proportionate public interest test, to understand whether that work could not be more effectively done in-house. The test will evaluate value for money, impact on service quality and economic and social value goals holistically.”
“The new UK Government should impose an embargo on arms sales to Israel”
A petition to end arms sales to Israel is launched by Labour activists with support from MPs and NEC members. Labour & Palestine report.
JULY 17, 2024
At an online event attended by over 500 people on Tuesday – and viewed by hundreds more on social media since – a new petition was launched simply entitled “The new UK Government should impose an embargo on arms sales to Israel,” and addressed to Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
The event heard from Palestinian Ambassador H.E. Husam Zomlot, Hugh Lanning of ‘Labour & Palestine,’ and Andy McDonald MP, who said, “The Conservative Government continued to licence arms sales to Israel and refused the Labour Opposition’s call to publish its legal advice on arms sales. We must have the announcement of a ceasefire and the end to all military action. Britain must use all levers necessary to achieve this, including the end of arms export licensing as a first step.”
The launching of the petition has been welcomed by four elected Constituency Representative members of Labour’s governing body, the National Executive Committee (NEC).
NEC member Jess Barnard, who chaired the event, said, “An embargo on arms sales to Israel is an immediate step that would show a commitment to international law – and be a step towards a just peace for the people of Palestine. It should be done immediately.”
Supporting the petition, fellow Labour NEC member Yasmin Dar said, “We cannot be complicit in the brutal slaughter of the Palestinians. Our weapons cannot be used to cause death and destruction to the lives of innocent civilians. This has to end, humanity has to prevail: we want an immediate cease fire.”
Adding her support to the campaign, NEC member Gemma Bolton commented, “Arms sales to Israel must be halted immediately to help prevent yet more untold suffering in Gaza. The UK government has a legal obligation to halt weapons exports to any country where there is a risk they will be used in war crimes and the case before the International Criminal Court is a clear indication of this.”
Another NEC member, Mish Rahman added, “Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have all suspended arms sales to Israel in the past. This time, with almost 40,000 deaths leading to a plausible case for genocide and the vast majority of dead being innocent women and children, our Prime Minister and renowned human rights lawyer Keir Starmer should know what the right thing to do is – suspend arms sales to Israel right now!”
The petition can be viewed at here. Labour & Palestine will also be launching a contemporary motion for Labour Party Conference 2024 on Palestine later this week, which will include the call for an arms embargo. You can view the online event Palestine: What should the new UK Government do?here.
Image: Ceasefire demonstration, London, November 2023. c/o Labour Hub.
Colonial and Labour History – Two Sides of the Same Coin
Farage says she is “trashing our nation”. Hear Professor Corinne Fowler on the Labour Left Podcast talking to Bryn Griffiths.
JULY 16, 2024
The Labour Left Podcast summer special has taken a break from its usual diet of labour movement controversy and embarked on a walk in the countryside! You can watch it on You Tube here.
Our guest Corinne Fowler, Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester, specialises in colonial history, decolonisation and the British countryside’s relationship with the Empire.
The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph historians were so quick off the mark that they didn’t even bother to read Corinne’s new book. In a departure from academic orthodoxy, they launched their attacks before publication.
So, why did Professor Corinne Fowler boil their blood? Back in 2019, Corinne was seconded to the National Trust to lay the foundations for a new training and interpretation programme about country houses’ colonial connections. As part of her secondment, she co-authored an academic report for the National Trust which brought together much of the existing academic and peer-appraised writing on the Trust’s properties’ many links to colonialism.
To say that the populist right weren’t quite ready to embrace the filling of gaps in our history doesn’t quite capture the moment. The ‘war on woke’ warriors kicked off to defend their history from above and make sure that everybody else’s history remained silent.
Nigel Farage talked of the “trashing of our nation” and the Daily Telegraph responded to the, peer-appraised, academic report by announcing that the National Trust was “at war with the past.” As if that wasn’t enough, the unfortunately named Tory Common Sense Group declared the “Battle of Britain.”
Corinne Fowler’s patient telling of our history is a compelling story. You can listen to the podcast here, find out about her new book and hear what it’s like to find yourself on the front line of the ‘war on woke’.
Our Island Stories has ten carefully curated walks and it is our book of the summer for 2024. If you want to know why Britain’s colonial history abroad and its labour history at home count as “two sides of the same coin” this is the book for you.
You can watch the podcast on YouTube here , Apple podcasts here, Audible here and listen to it on Spotify here If your favourite podcast site isn’t listed, just search for the Labour Left Podcast.
Bryn Griffiths is the host of Labour Hub’s spin off the Labour Left Podcast. He is an activist in the labour movement, Momentum and The World Transformed in North Essex. You can find all the episodes of the Labour Left Podcast here or if you prefer audio platforms (for example, Amazon, Audible Spotify, Apple, etc.,) just search for Labour Left Podcast.
Bryn Griffiths is standing for the National Policy Forum CLP Representatives Eastern Region Division 1. He is standing as part of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance team and you can find all your left candidates across the country here. Now the General Election is over, please campaign for all the left candidates.
Mike Phipps reflects on a day of debate and what the left needs to do now.
JULY 17, 2024
‘Mapping the Hope’, a day-long series of political discussions organised by Lewes CLP on Saturday, was the first grassroots Party gathering to analyse the 2024 general election results. Coming from a long pedigree of events hosted by this local Party, it did not disappoint and the venue was full to capacity.
Rather than stage a left wing echo chamber, the organisers prefer to invite speakers from a broader political spectrum. The morning session showcased Tim Bale, who has written extensively about the Conservative Party, and Christabel Cooper, Research Director at Labour Together.
Tories at the crossroads
Bale addressed the central dilemma facing the Tory Party – whether it should seek to return to the centre ground or move further towards the radical right and focus on the latter’s talking points – not just the ‘war on woke’ and hostility to immigration, but also opposition to Net Zero. If the Tories continue to let their grassroots members have the final say on choosing the party’s leader, they may well shift further to the right. Currently the party is evenly split on whether to merge with Reform UK.
Christabel Cooper crunched through the most salient numbers from this month’s general election, remarking on Labour’s small share of the vote and the low turnout – particularly marked in constituencies with large numbers of young people, ethnic minorities and people who don’t own their own home – all traditional Labour-inclined voters.
One could also mention that an estimated 400,000 people were denied the right to vote because they lacked the relevant identification. The last Tory government introduced this restrictive policy and Labour proposes, with some modifications, to retain it.
Cooper acknowledged that there was considerable evidence of last-minute switching from Labour to the Greens, in view of the widely predicted landslide, and that Labour now has fewer hard-core loyalist voters and more transactional voters, who expect to benefit from a Labour government and will turn away from it if they don’t.
Prepare to be disappointed
Echoing NEC member Mish Rahman’s observation that there are now no more safe seats, she argued that because many more constituencies are now marginal, Labour will need a strategy to win back votes lost on its left to Independents and Greens. That’s welcome – particularly as Labour’s election strategy seemed to legitimise the concerns of Tory voters, while delegitimising those of the left. But how this can be done without re-empowering the Party’s grassroots looks more difficult to achieve.
One participant said to applause that their CLP had actually asked the leadership team not to come to their constituency, specifically in order to minimise the electoral threat posed by forces to the left of Labour. This was best neutralised by careful engagement with members in the local community.
Dealing with the threat of Reform also looks problematic. If the Labour apparatus looks at the problem purely from an electoral standpoint, it may simply not bother. Reform came second to Labour in 89 constituencies while the Tories came second to Labour in over 200 seats. So allowing Farage’s crew to continue to split the right wing vote may look like a short-term way forward. However, given the wider threat of far right ideas in Britain and beyond, particularly in shaping the overall political conversation, this would be a foolhardy approach. It also means that Labour would continue to turn its back on some its former voters in the most desperately poor areas of the UK.
If Labour now relies more on floating voters than its hard-core supporters, that suggests it will do more to please the former than the latter. Faithful activists like those who attended this event should prepare to be disappointed, suggested Cooper.
Build alliances
There were different workshops in the afternoon. I attended one with Emma Burnell, founder of the political communications consultancy Political Human. She described herself as “soft left”, although that may be a rather generous epithet for someone who wrote a Guardian piece a few years ago headlined “Rachel Reeves was right – Labour must reduce people’s reliance on benefits”.
Her breezy optimism – that Labour’s 34% of the vote was not too bad in the context of an emerging multiparty system and that not being overwhelmingly popular at the start of its term might be an advantage – seemed at odds with the scale of the task facing the new government and the expectation that it must start delivering quickly if it is to restore political trust. But her emphasis on looking for what we have in common, rather than what divides us, was welcome, particularly if it means an end to the period of unparalleled factionalism that the Party leadership has lately inflicted on the grassroots.
The final plenary showcased another politically broad platform including Peter Lamb, the new Labour MP for Crawley, which despite its location in the prosperous south has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the country, and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, whose priorities for the new government included the return of Sure Start and and ending the two child benefit cap.
It’s hard to day how permanent some of these goals will be but the left would be unwise not to act on such laudable sentiments and build the widest possible campaigns, as is already underway with the demand to scrap the two child benefit cap.
The left should take heart from the successful campaign to keep Diane Abbott as Labour’s candidate and recognise that when it builds broad coalitions around popular issues it can win the argument. With rumours circulating that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner could lose control of the New Deal for Working People initiative to the more employer-friendly Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds, we are presented with another issue on which the left needs to be part of a broad campaign alongside the trade unions.
Equally, the Labour left needs to recognise that hundreds of thousands of voters supported platforms to the left of the Party, including some Independents and Greens. What unites the successful candidates – Jeremy Corbyn and the elected Independents, especially – is they all have deep roots in the communities they represent. These people are our natural allies and, issue by issue, we need to find ways of campaigning alongside them, showing in practice that the Labour left can play a central role in challenging the government and holding it to account.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Inset photo: Final plenary. From left to right: Christine Bayliss, Labour Party PPC ,Bexhill and Battle, 2024; Peter Lamb, Labour MP for Crawley; Chair, Mark Perryman, Lewes CLP, Events Organiser; Polly Toynbee, columnist, the Guardian; Simon Weller, assistant general secretary, ASLEF and TUC General Council member.c/o Labour Hub.
UK
Centre for Hate Studies secures record grant for student harassment research
17 July 2024 University of Leicester
A major study that will examine harassment against university students in England has secured a record amount of funding for the University of Leicester’s College of Social Science, Arts and Humanities.
Launching in January 2025, ‘A Catalyst for Change: Transforming Responses to Harassment in Higher Education’ is the largest study of its kind. The 30-month project will be undertaken across a range of higher education institutions across the country and will be supported by the Office for Students and Universities UK.
The project aims to uncover the scale and nature of students’ experiences of harassment through a series of university-wide surveys, interviews, focus groups and workshops.
The research will engage directly with home and international students who have encountered any form of harassment during their time at university, as well as with student support services and with university senior leaders to map out the future of responding to harassment in higher education.
The research builds on a pilot study undertaken at the University of Leicester by the Centre for Hate Studies in 2020. This study was the first of its kind to look at harassment targeted against any feature of a student’s identity and feeds into a sector-wide effort to address harassment and other unacceptable behaviours within the university environment.
Established in 2014, the Centre for Hate Studies is a world-leading research centre whose core mission is to transform responses to hate and hostility throughout society.
Co-Director of the Centre for Hate Studies and Director of the Institute for Policy, Professor Neil Chakraborti will lead the project.
Professor Chakraborti said: “Tackling harassment is an urgent challenge within increasingly diverse student communities, but a lack of evidence, consistency and prioritisation continue to undermine preventative efforts within higher education. Our research will address this challenge head-on by helping universities to recognise the various forms that harassment can take within different physical and digital spaces, and its impacts upon our student bodies.
“In doing so, the research will identify ways in which effective institutional support can be shaped by students’ own experiences and expectations, and by good practice from across the sector, to ensure that universities are safe and inclusive environments for all.”
The Body Shop: UK tycoon nears administration rescue for high street beauty chain amid store, job cuts - news
By Alex Nelson Published 17th Jul 2024 The British tycoon’s rescue deal could potentially reopen closed stores and save jobs!
A consortium led by a British tycoon is close to securing a rescue deal for The Body Shop Investment firm Aurea is in exclusive talks with joint administrators, aiming to finalise a deal in the coming weeks
Aurea is currently reviewing The Body Shop's financial records to ensure the viability of the rescue plan
The Body Shop fell into administration in early February, resulting in the closure of 82 stores and significant job losses
The deal could stabilise the chain, potentially reopening previously closed stores and saving jobs
A consortium led by British tycoon Mike Jatania is nearing a rescue deal for a struggling high street beauty chain.
As confirmed by the administrators of The Body Shop, a bidding team from Jatania’s investment firm, Aurea, is in exclusive negotiations with joint administrators at FRP Advisory.
They are considering former Molton Brown CEO, Charles Denton, to lead the management team. In a joint statement, Aurea and The Body Shop International administrators expressed hope for a deal to be finalised in the "coming weeks."
They also said that Aurea is currently reviewing The Body Shop’s financial records.
The Body Shop fell into administration in early February after previous forecasts for how much funding it would need to keep going proved too low, leading to hundreds of job losses and dozens of store closures.
The joint administrators of The Body Shop International and Aurea said: “While the deal is not yet complete, we believe the combined experience of the consortium, together with the existing management team, represents the best outcome for creditors and will ultimately ensure the long-term success of The Body Shop.
The rescue deal could provide the necessary funding to stabilise The Body Shop's finances, allowing it to continue operations without the immediate threat of further closures or job losses.
Depending on the terms of the deal and the strategic vision of the new management team, there is a possibility that some previously closed stores could be reopened, but this would depend on the viability and performance of specific locations.
The joint administrators added: “A period of due diligence will now take place, with the intention to complete the transaction in the coming weeks.” It comes after it was reported last week that Jatania was nearing a deal for the chain following the recent bid deadline.
Jatania previously ran Lornamead – the owner of personal care brands including Lypsyl, Woods of Windsor, Yardley and Harmony haircare – which he sold to rival Li & Fung for around £155 million over 10 years ago.
Administrators have so far closed 82 Body Shop stores as part of a restructuring launched after the business collapsed, leaving it with 116 stores. Around 489 jobs have also been cut as part of the shop closures, with about 270 head office jobs also axed.
The business had employed around 1,500 store workers before the administration. The Body Shop hit the wall just weeks after European private equity firm Aurelius took control of the business, buying it from Brazilian cosmetics giant Natura & Co.
Aurelius had already agreed a deal to sell The Body Shop’s operations in most of mainland Europe and in parts of Asia to an international family office.
The Body Shop was founded in 1976 by Anita Roddick and her husband Gordon as one of the first companies to promote so-called ethical consumerism, focusing on ethically produced cosmetics and skincare products.
UK
Rare examples of 17th-century paper-cutting ‘saved from skip’ to go on display
Harriet Sherwood Tue, 16 July 2024 Rare surviving 17th-century decorative paper cuttings discovered under floorboards at Sutton House.Photograph: James Dobson/National Trust Images
Rare examples of 17th-century decorative paper-cutting found amid debris at a historic house in east London that was part of what was known as “the ladies’ university” are to go on display.
Eight examples of the art form have been identified, including a hen embellished with coloured silk and a tiny folded star. They were discovered on a lintel where they are assumed to have settled after falling between floorboards about 350 years ago.
Experts believe that girls attending a school based at Sutton House in Hackney were taught the art of intricate paper-cutting and folding along with other crafts such as embroidery and needlework.
Designs were cut from books using tiny scissors, knives and pins, and then hand-coloured to use as decorations on boxes, bowls and other items.
“It’s an art form that is discussed in 17th-century domestic manuals, but there is very little material survival – only three examples from 17th-century England, of which this is one,” said Isabella Rosner, an expert in modern material culture.
The girls were taught decorative arts alongside reading, writing, arithmetic, French, housekeeping, music and dancing. “They were learning to create something beautiful, and it required patience, dexterity and artistry,” Rosner said.
The work was akin to the popular art of Japanning – imitating Asian lacquer work – but instead using cutouts, watercolours and varnish.
Hannah Woolley, the author of household management books such as A Guide to Ladies (1668) and a skilled paper-cutter, is believed to have taught at Sutton House girls’ school. The surviving examples of paper-cutting were probably “carried out by preteen and teenage girls under her tutelage”, said Rosner.
Sutton House opened as a girls’ boarding school in 1657. Kate Simpson, a senior collections and house officer at the National Trust, said: “It was a relatively new concept to have girls educated. They came from middle- and upper-class families.”
The trust bought Sutton House in 1938 and leased it to the local council and then a trade union. When the union moved out in 1985, squatters moved in and hosted rock concerts and club nights.
In the late 1980s, the Sutton House Society campaigned to save the building for community use. Its treasurer, Ken Jacobs, found the tiny paper-cuttings while sifting through dust. “He saved them from ending up in a skip,” said Simpson.
But it was another 30-plus years before Rosner identified the objects as rare examples of decorative paper-cutting. They will be on display at Sutton House from Friday 19 July until December, after which they will return to storage.
“The colours are so vivid because they have been hidden from light for so long. We want to make sure that we don’t expose them to light for too long,” Simpson said.
The Transformative Power of Urban Agriculture: How Co-operatives in North America are Cultivating Change
Urban agriculture, supported by the co-operative movement, represents a critical piece of the puzzle in our quest for sustainable cities.
Urban agriculture is emerging as a transformative force reshaping our cities, fostering sustainability, and nurturing community bonds. My Fellowship offered me a unique opportunity to explore this movement’s potential, initially seeking to understand how urban food growing could boost biodiversity. However, my journey across North America revealed a broader and more profound impact: urban agriculture’s power to redefine our relationship with food, the environment, and each other.
The urgency for change is stark. Conventional agricultural practices, dominated by chemical inputs and monocultures, have ravaged rural ecosystems, depleting soils and eroding biodiversity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that a global temperature rise above 1.5°C poses grave risks to food security and ecological stability. Coupled with the UK’s heavy reliance on imported fresh produce, which leaves us vulnerable to climate-related supply chain disruptions, the necessity for sustainable urban food systems is clear.
Climate change and food insecurity hit the poorest in society the most. According to the Food Foundation, 9.3 million adults in the UK experienced food insecurity in 2022. The crisis is particularly acute in urban areas where high living costs, coupled with limited access to fresh produce, create significant barriers to healthy eating. The Trussell Trust reported a record number of emergency food parcels distributed by food banks in 2021-2022, underscoring the urgent need for systemic change.
Urban agriculture presents a promising alternative. Cultivating food within city limits not only reduces the carbon footprint associated with long-distance food transport but also alleviates pressure on rural landscapes. Its environmental benefits are manifold: enhancing biodiversity, improving air and water quality, mitigating floods, and fostering ecological resilience. Moreover, local food production promotes healthier dietary choices, contributing to positive public health outcomes and easing the burden on healthcare systems. Incorporating urban agriculture into planning should be a cornerstone of efforts to achieve biodiversity net gain (BNG).
During my eight-week exploration of North American urban agriculture, I encountered pioneering initiatives that offer valuable lessons for cities like London. Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, Vancouver, and Portland are at the forefront, implementing innovative policies such as mandatory green roofs, expansive rooftop farms, and inclusive ‘agrihoods’ that seamlessly integrate agriculture into urban planning. My report, published in May, delves into these initiatives and examines their applicability to other urban centres facing similar challenges.
Keep Growing Detroit’s urban farm. Image: Leanne Werner
As climate disasters intensify, the imperative to embrace sustainable practices like urban agriculture becomes ever more pressing. While not a panacea for the climate crisis, urban agriculture is a vital component of a holistic approach to building resilient, equitable, and sustainable cities.
The success of urban agriculture hinges on collaborative efforts, innovative policies, and community engagement. Detroit’s Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), co-founded by Malik Kenyatta Yakini, exemplifies this ethos. Operating a seven-acre urban farm, DBCFSN is spearheading the Detroit Food Commons, a co-operative grocery store and community hub aimed at addressing food insecurity and promoting local economic development.
Gateway Community Garden with Pastor Glenda Fields, Sara Elbohy and Leanne Werner. Image: Leanne Werner
The Detroit People’s Food Co-Op is a Black-led, community-owned grocery co-operative dedicated to enhancing access to healthy food and providing food education for Detroit residents. This co-operative meets the community’s needs through democratic control by its member-owners. Yakini envisions this project as part of a broader movement for power, self-determination, and justice, contributing to an international food sovereignty movement that embraces Black communities in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa. While in Montreal, Carrefour Solidaire cultivates a healthy community and social justice through the power of food. Growing food at various city locations, Carrefour Solidaire ensures all harvested produce returns to the community. Their community kitchen and shop operate a sliding scale payment system based on individual circumstances, balancing financial sustainability with accessibility.
Regulars at Carrefour Solidaire’s community kitchen in Montreal. Image: Leanne Werner Similarly, FoodShare in Toronto sells produce at below-market prices at farmers’ markets, striving to make culturally appropriate food accessible to everyone and supporting a vision where everyone can nourish themselves and their loved ones.
Toronto Metropolitan University has two rooftop farms on campus that produce and distribute food, facilitate research and engage the community through ecological rooftop farming and food justice initiatives. The roof-top farm produces around 2,500kg of food per year from its market garden section. They have a very equitable model for distributing the produce: a third is donated, a third is sold to students at a subsidised rate, and a third is sold at market rate. The donated food goes to beneficial organisations including the Native Women Services, Good Food services and outreach work in the city’s food deserts.
FoodShare’s Orlando Martin Lopez Gomez and Leanne Werner at Burmhampton High School farm. Image: Leanne Werner
These co-operative and equitable models highlight the potential of urban agriculture to address food insecurity, promote local economic development, and foster community resilience. By nurturing urban ecosystems and fostering a sense of collective stewardship, cities can forge a path towards a more food-secure and harmonious future.
Urban agriculture, supported by the co-operative movement, represents a critical piece of the puzzle in our quest for sustainable cities. It reconnects residents with nature, promotes fairer food prices, and fosters a sense of community and shared responsibility. As the new Labour government navigates the challenges of climate change and urbanisation the lessons from North America’s urban agriculture pioneers offer a roadmap for a more resilient and equitable future. You can read the full report here.
Leanne is a former Labour councillor and co-founder and director of Wilder, an environmental social enterprise based in London that creates spaces for wildlife and people in ultra-urban areas.
