Environment, Government, Politics, Science

Labour is urged to crack down on farmers spreading sludge

ENVIRONMENT

MINISTERS are coming under increasing pressure to stop farmers spreading byproducts of human sewage on fields over fears of “forever chemicals” getting into the food system.

Campaigners have urged Labour to clamp down on the use of sludge to fertilise agricultural land.

Also known as biosolids, sludge is produced by dewatering treated sewage. It is nutrient-rich and is spread across agricultural land, amounting to 3.6 million tonnes annually, says the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management.

While the practice is regulated, academics and campaigners argue that rules governing the use of sludge have not kept pace with the science. Regulations have been unchanged since 1989.

Sludge can contain toxic waste from homes, including pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and microplastics. Each gram of biosolid can hold up to 24 microplastic particles, representing 1pc of its weight, according to research from Cardiff University.

It is widely accepted in academic circles that sludge spreading is a major problem. Water companies profit from processing industrial waste containing “forever chemicals” that end up on farmland.

Forever chemicals, officially known as PFAS, do not break down in the human body or on the land. They are found in everything from carpet cleaners to corrosion-protecting products and have been widely used since the 1950s. They can cause cancer, harm the immune system, and damage the liver.

It is indicative, then, that water companies must take responsibility. And, if they will not act, the Government must legislate and ensure the upcoming White Paper tackles agricultural pollution. This is urgent because our soil and waterways are being contaminated with toxic, persistent chemicals, threatening food and water security.

The Government’s long-awaited White Paper on water industry reform is expected to be published in January. Despite repeated calls for a crackdown on sludge, the report cannot be allowed to ignore the issue.

It comes despite the Cunliffe Review calling for action. The report, to which the White Paper is a response, says: “There should be tighter regulation of sludge spreading on farmland, recognising that sludge may contain PFAS, pharmaceuticals and toxic metals, which have public health impacts.”

Alistair Boxall, professor of environmental science at the University of York, said he is increasingly concerned about long-term, low-level exposure to contaminants in sludge. He said: “We’re potentially exposed to these things our whole lifetime. The UK is not protecting its soils and its crops from this stuff.”

Research from the University of Plymouth has demonstrated that “nanoplastics” – particles so small they can penetrate cell membranes – are absorbed into the edible sections of crops. The study found that a single radish can eventually accumulate millions of these nanoplastics in its roots before they spread through the plant.

Sludge is an attractive option for farmers. While synthetic fertiliser costs £60 per tonne, sludge can be purchased for £1.50 per tonne. Water companies rely on farmers to take the substance, which is an unavoidable byproduct of wastewater management.

There is always the matter of liability in any looming scandal, and this needs addressed. Public health is a serious issue. Neither the water companies who supply the product, or farmers who use it, be exonerated from blame.

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Arts, Books, Culture, Literature, Society, Theatre

Wokeism has lost its grip on the arts

THE ARTS

Intro: This year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned.

From the literary world to the theatre, we have seen a pushback against identity politics

FOR many arts critics’ 2025 was the year that wokeism perished. And not before time.

Everyone, of course, is entitled to hold their own opinions, with some still representing a section of the liberal bien-pensant opinion in the arts that believes wokery to be a commendable necessity rather than an outdated and invidious ideology. Julian Clary, for instance, when interviewed recently, made his customary and screamingly inappropriate remarks that easily surpassed any definition of satire.

Nonetheless, this year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned. Unsurprisingly, it was swiftly discovered that the emperor had no clothes.

The publishing industry has been the most striking example of the upturned order. Around 2020, there was a clear edict that the profession had been taken over by white middle-class gatekeepers, and that this had to change in the interests of social justice.

If you stood against this – on the grounds that a bad book was a bad book, no matter what the skin colour, sexual orientation, or social background of its author – you were accused of being “elitist” and your career was promptly curtailed.

Scapegoats were routinely found, most egregiously the teacher and poet Kate Clanchy, who was the victim of little less than a witch hunt. Her apparent crime was that of “cultural appropriation”. Clanchy was driven to near-suicidal despair, and her publisher Pan Macmillan took ostentatious delight and glee in washing their hands of her.

Five years later, Clanchy has received a long overdue apology from Pan Macmillan for the reputational damage she suffered; the publisher stated that the hounding represented “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past”. A sympathetic and thorough BBC Radio 4 documentary, Anatomy of a Cancellation, examined the controversy afresh, interviewing those involved from all sides. Few would doubt that Clanchy emerged vindicated.

There have been other indications, too, that the wind is shifting. The Booker Prize for 2025 went to David Szalay’s Flesh, an unsparing account of the sexual and social coming-of-age of a taciturn young Hungarian man.

Szalay, the Stowe and Oxford-educated novelist of some standing, is a heterosexual white man – a category of people who are no longer supposed either to write or read novels – who has written a good book, rather than some piece of woke agitprop. There is every chance that it will endure far beyond flashier, less accomplished fiction.

So, too, should Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s stunning debut Shibboleth, one of the funniest and wisest satirical narratives available on the hopeless state of contemporary academia.

Away from publishing, the National Theatre remains in thrall to modishness under its artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, but the visionary regime of the RSC’s Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey has demonstrated that classical theatre done well, with great actors, is what audiences really want to see. The arts world will be hopeful that the incoming artistic director of the Old Vic, Rupert Goold, will bring similar rigour to the South Bank next year.

Opera and classical music are following the lead, prizing clarity and intelligence above trendiness. Vanity Fair declared approvingly in recent times that “the opera is having a woke renaissance”. How things change. “Misguided wokeism” has been criticised as being the philistine impulse on part of the small-minded who believe that amateurism, with the “right” motivations, was somehow more impressive than non-ideological professionalism. Most people should agree.

The battle for good sense is not yet won, and we should be mindful of this. There are arts apparatchiks with their vested interests, wielding their pronouns and non-binary statuses like weapons of war, who will fight what they see as anti-progress for their entire lives. Yet others, who have been tired and fed up with tokenism and the oppressive rise of being told what to think – or else – may breathe a natural sigh of relief.

Most of us should be happy to end 2025 by seeing those who embrace wokeism with the same élan as they did previously [as being] behind us in time-honoured fashion.

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Internet, Mental Health, Religion

Man’s worship of the machine: void of purpose

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

THE sometime 20th century supposition that man had supposedly “killed God” stemmed from the secularisation of the West which left a void. That was filled by many nation states who implemented a rights-based humanism of common purpose and shared endeavour. Today that purpose has withered, too.

Our loss of faith in God has been coupled with a loss of faith in each other. The void has opened up again and we are using technology in an attempt to fill it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the world wide web was meant to herald an era of human flourishing, of rich cultural exchange, and global harmony. Knowledge was to spread in a way the printing press’s greatest advocates could only have dreamt of.

But rather than usher in an age of hyper-rationalism, the internet has exposed an age of debased religiosity. Having been dismissed as a relic from a bygone era, religion has returned in a thin, hollow version, shorn of wonder and purpose.

Look around today, for all is clear to see. Smartphone use is almost ubiquitous (95 per cent of the population own one, with as good as 100 per cent of 16-24 year olds). Artificial Intelligence, from chatbots, recommended search engines, or work applications, has become an everyday part of life for most people.

Our use of these technologies is increasingly quasi-devotional. We seem to enact the worst parody of religion: one in which we ask an “all-knowing” entity for answers; many outsource their thinking and writing; it is ever-present, shaping how we live our lives – yet most of us have only the faintest idea how it works.

The algorithmic operations of AI are increasingly opaque, and observable to a vanishingly small number of people at the top-end of a handful of companies. And even then, those people themselves cannot say in truth how their creations will augment and develop for the simple fact they don’t know.

Whether videos with Google Veo 3 or essays via ChatGPT, we can now sit alone and create almost anything we want at the touch of a button. Where God took seven days to build the world in His image, we can build a video replica in seven seconds. But the thrill is short-lived, as we are quickly submerged under a flood of content, pumped out with ease. There is no digital sublime, no sense of lasting awe, just a vague unease and apprehension as we hunch over our phones, irritated and unfocused. Increasingly, we have become aware of our own loneliness (which has reached “epidemic” proportions).

And perhaps the strangest of all, we accept AI’s view of us. Once, only God was able to X-ray the soul. Later, we believed the high priests of psychology could do the same, human to human. Now, we are seeking out that same sense of understanding in mute lines of code.

A mere 18 months or so since the tech became widely available, 64 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds in the UK have used an AI therapist, while in America, three quarters of 13 to 17-year-olds have used AI companion apps such as Character.ai or Replika.ai (which let users create digital friends or romantic partners they can chat with). Some 20 per cent of American teens spent as much or more time with their AI “friends” as they did their real ones.

Digging deeper into the numbers available, part of the attraction of socialising in this way is that you get a reflection, not an actual person: someone “always on your side”, never judgmental, never challenging. We treat LLMs (Large Language Models) with the status of an omniscient deity, just one that never corrects or disciplines. Nothing is risked in these social-less engagements – apart from your ability to grow as a person and be egotistically fulfilled. Habitualised, we risk becoming so fragile that any form of friction or resistance becomes unbearable.

Where social media at least relied upon the affirmation of your peers – hidden behind a screen though they were – AI is opening up the possibility to exist solely in a loop of self-affirmation.

Religion has many critics of course, but at the heart of the Abrahamic tradition is an argument about how to live now on this earth, together. In monotheism, God is not alone. He has his intermediaries: rabbis, priests, and imams who teach, proscribe and slowly, over time, build a system of values. There is a community of belief, of leaders and believers who discuss what is right and what is wrong, who share a creed, develop it, and translate sometimes difficult text into the texture of daily life and what it means for us. There is a code, but it is far from binary.

And, so, while it is possible to divine in the statements of our tech-bro-overlords through a certain proselytising fervour, there is no sense of the good life, no proper vision of society, and no concern for the future. Their creations are of course just tools – the promised superintelligence is yet to emerge and may never actually materialise – but they are transformative, and their potentially destructive power means they are necessarily moral agents. And the best we get are naïve claims about abundance for all or eradicating the need for work. A vague plan seems to exist that we will leave this planet once we’ve bled it white.

There is a social and spiritual hunger that a life online cannot satisfy. Placing our faith in the bright offerings of modernity is blinding us to each other – to what is human, and what is sacred.

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