BBC4 Analysis: Thinking for the Long Term

"The origin of civil government," wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1739, is that "men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote."

Today, Hume's view that governments can help societies abandon rampant short-termism and adopt a more long term approach, feels little more than wishful thinking. The "now" commands more and more of our attention - quick fixes are the order of the day. But could that be about to change?

Margaret Heffernan asks whether the current pandemic might be the moment we are forced to rediscover our ability to think long term. Could our ability to emerge well from the current health crisis be dependent, in fact, on our ability to improve our long-term thinking?

Among those taking part: Paul Polman (Co-founder of Imagine and former CEO of Unilever), General Sir Nick Carter (Chief of the Defence Staff), Justine Greening (former Conservative minister and founder of the Social Mobility Pledge), Lord Gus O'Donnell (former head of the Civil Service), Chris Llewellyn Smith (former Director General of CERN), and Sophie Howe (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales).

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The Guardian: Labour councils launch slavery statue review as another is removed

All statues in Labour councils across England and Wales, and across London, will be examined for links to slavery and plantation owners, their leaders have said, as an east London authority took one down off its plinth on Tuesday evening. [...]

Earlier, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the capital’s landmarks – including street names, the names of public buildings and plaques – would be reviewed by a commission to ensure they reflect the capital’s diversity, with a view to removing those with links to slavery after Black Lives Matter protesters tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.

In Manchester, the council announced a city-wide review of all the statues in Manchester “to understand their history and context”. Councillor Luthfur Rahman said members of the public would also be asked for suggestions on “missing” statues. [...]

Pressed on Sky News about where to draw the line, given Winston Churchill held some racist views, Khan said the cases of Churchill, Gandhi and Malcolm X showed that many great historical figures were not perfect and history should be taught “warts and all”. But there were clear-cut figures such as those actively involved in the slave trade and ownership who should not be celebrated, the mayor said. [...]

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has said it was “completely wrong” for protesters to pull down the statue of Colston and dump it in the harbour in Bristol – putting him at odds with some MPs on the left of his party – while emphasising the monument should never have been there in the first place.

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Business Insider: People in Wales are creating witty travel posters encouraging visitors to stay away

While the United Kingdom remains in lockdown, there have been reports of day-trippers still visiting the country.

In an attempt to discourage travel and give people a laugh, Owen Williams designed witty posters. [...]

The idea sparked when the country's tourism body, Visit Wales, tweeted out: "Visit Wales. Later."

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The Guardian: 'Thank you Greta': natural solutions to UK flooding climb the agenda

The UK’s flooding this year is a story of desperation – but also hope, says John Hughes, development manager at Shropshire Wildlife Trust, who works in the valley. Following widespread acceptance of the climate and ecological emergency, Hughes believes people are increasingly looking to nature for solutions. [...]

“I say thanks very much Extinction Rebellion and Greta [Thunberg] – you’ve done a great job. It’s the job we’ve been trying to do for 50 years. We need to take a holistic view – land can do many, many things.”

In the past, flood plains acted like sponges that soaked up water and stopped it flowing headlong into settlements downstream. Wetter habitats provided useful materials such as willow and reeds for baskets and thatched roofs. However, natural wet woodland, neutral grassland, fens and marshes were ironed out of the postwar landscape and now cover just 11% of English and Welsh flood plains. Intensive agriculture covers 70%. [...]

The problem is that reducing food production is currently counterintuitive to most farmers’ business plan, says Dr Marc Stutter, a soil and water scientist at the James Hutton Institute. “The biggest thing we’re fighting against is that the farmers and their fathers and grandfathers have been very proud of the way they’ve brought the land into condition for crops and quite rightfully so. Their parents have spent a lot of effort draining the land and now there’s someone telling them they want pockets of it to be wet up again.

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The Guardian: 'I haven’t seen a healthy version of marriage': children of divorce on the lasting impact

The legislation transformed society, changed attitudes, emancipated women, and arguably saved many children from the emotional damage of being raised in miserable homes. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 42% of all marriages in England and Wales currently end in divorce; and in 2017, 62% of divorces of opposite sex couples were on the petition of the wife.

Divorce is now so common that its impact on children and their emotional wellbeing can sometimes be downplayed. Yet almost every child of divorce I have spoken to acknowledges that it has shaped the way they see the world. It feels almost childish to speak of the emotional legacy of my own parents’ divorce, how it left its mark on me in a hundred perceptible and imperceptible ways; after all, it was so many years ago. Yet however well you do it, divorce determines who we become as adults. [...]

As we near the end of the 2010s, there has been significant progress in attitudes towards divorce. Gay marriage has been legalised, and blended, non-traditional families are increasingly the norm. Even Prince Harry married a divorcee. In April, the government announced fresh plans to introduce no-fault divorce – though it is hard to know if and when this will happen. The reforms will include a minimum timeframe of six months from petition stage to a marriage being ended, designed to allow couples to reflect on their decision. They will also prevent people from refusing a divorce if their spouse wants one.

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The Guardian: Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on Brexit could yet pay off, even for remainers. Here’s why

Yet, seeing Campbell announce this week that he’s given up on the Labour party, mainly because under Jeremy Corbyn it won’t go all-out remain, I couldn’t help wondering if he shouldn’t also take heed of that Irish lesson. Because if you want Labour to be a pure remain party – against the wishes of so many of its marginalised, traditional voters, particularly those working-class people in the north – then don’t do it after a referendum in which those same voters had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to actually make their vote count. Don’t choose this moment to tell millions of long-standing party supporters that you’re ignoring their deeply held views. [...]

Corbyn is facing far more flak for this today than New Labour did 20 years ago, and that’s because many on the right of the party don’t actually want to see him win power. (If you want proof, look at Stephen Kinnock’s stony-faced reaction, captured by a BBC documentary camera, as the news broke that Theresa May had lost her majority in the 2017 election.) Many of those in and around politics still yearn for the Blair-Brown era when they were close to power. They’re not worried about the damage Labour would suffer by going “full remain”: an election defeat would merely hasten the day when the hated Corbyn steps down.

Others say that now Boris Johnson has energised the hard right and united his cabinet over no deal, Corbyn must do the same – but for remain. This is nonsense. Johnson has already seen the damage caused by his rash decision-making. He’s boxed himself in by refusing to talk to European leaders until they ditch the backstop; he’s been slapped down by Nicola Sturgeon and learned that his stance is boosting the cause of Scottish independence; he’s faced angry Welsh farmers whose livelihood is threatened by no-deal tariffs; and he’s gone to Northern Ireland, where he’s been told that the peace process is at risk. And in Brecon and Radnorshire he’s tasted defeat after just a week in office, losing an 8,000 majority. Far from rallying supporters, his Brexit stance has just piled up his problems. He can’t even rely on the party’s hardcore Brexiteers to support any deal he might achieve with Europe.

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UnHerd: How the Left lost Wales

While Brecon and Radnorshire voters are today expected to hand a victory to the Liberal Democrats, the governing party will most likely only lose because of the strong showing of the Brexit Party, with Labour way behind in fourth. Across the country the Tories sit on 24%, two points ahead of Labour, with Nigel Farage’s outfit following close behind in third. This means that in one of the EU’s most deprived regions – and historically Britain’s socialist heartland – more than four in ten voters opt for Right-wing parties. [...]

It’s true that many still harbour a great deal of resentment towards the Conservative Party. Some areas of South Wales have never recovered from the crash-deindustrialisation programme enacted by the Thatcher government, and the unemployment rate remains one of the highest in Britain. According to NHS data collected in 2013, one in six residents of Blaenau Gwent was collecting a prescription for antidepressants. Life expectancy in the region is among the lowest in England and Wales. [...]

Labour’s Welsh decline cannot entirely be pinned on Corbyn. Support here has been ebbing for some time and during the New Labour years the party’s share of the vote fell faster in Wales than in either England or Scotland. In fact Labour’s historical dominance of Welsh politics is arguably a factor in its declining fortunes. As Dan Evans wrote in a perceptive piece for Jacobin, one-partyism has encouraged complacency and nepotism in many traditional strongholds. Here “people advance and achieve positions of power not through their political competence or vision, but through party loyalty”. [...]

Labour has also been losing the battle of values, which in part explains the shift to the Conservatives. The coastal regions have long flirted with the Tories, but the Valleys – the traditional bastions of socialist politics – are also home to a small-c conservatism that sits uneasily with some of the liberal shibboleths that dominate contemporary Left-wing thought. Moreover, this anti-Conservative sentiment found in South Wales is partly a legacy of Margaret Thatcher, herself a liberal free marketeer rather than a traditional conservative.

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Aeon: The English question (09 August, 2016)

In many ways England has hidden in plain sight; its identity disguised by being part of larger political entities that it dominated. England swallowed its neighbours on the British Isles and Ireland three centuries ago, then spread out across the globe as the British Empire. Out of this expansion emerged a shared British identity; it borrowed mostly from Englishness but also provided a capaciousness under which being Welsh, and even Scottish or sometimes Irish, could fit. [...]

The reemergence of English nationalism from Britishness has been a long time coming. As recently as 1997, a British Social Attitudes survey found that 55 per cent of English voters called themselves British, while just 33 per cent said they were English. But as colonies freed themselves and as Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales increasingly controlled their own futures, the English started to believe that Britain was holding them back too. By 2012, the 22-point gap in the BSA study had vanished: now 43 per cent of voters identified as English, the same number who identified as B­­­ritish.[...]

The English – especially those who voted Conservative – noticed that England, per head of population, got less money from the Treasury than the other British nations. The central British government had ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but none for England. Scotland, where state expenditure per head is £1,600 higher than in England, has free NHS prescriptions. Scotland also has free – and excellent – university education. In England, students must pay. [...]

Sifting through the imagery driving this form of English nationalism, the vision of England that emerges is an old and familiar one. It is white, it is church-going in a ‘tea with the vicar’ kind of way and it celebrates World War Two’s victories as if they happened yesterday. It distrusts the foreign and the urban: it prefers villages and a never-changing countryside. It was best summed up by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1993 when he spoke of warm beer and cricket matches. It is a powerful vision and one not limited only to the right. The idea of England as a pastoral idyll, harking back to a pre-industrial age where everyone was content and at peace in nature, is a common one in culture, literature and politics. [...]

It is a fair point. For, if the progressive wing of English nationalism is to win out from the ruins of Brexit, then it will have to succeed at something British nationalism failed to do: knit a wide disparity of people together by persuading them of their mutual class interest in social justice. British nationalism did not succeed at this; its failure to convince a Glaswegian docker and a Birmingham factory worker that they have more in common than either has with a wealthy banker from Edinburgh or London partly explains the current fragmentation of British identity (and the British state). As the empire’s glow faded, a true class-based politics failed to emerge that could have provided a viable push for a British party of the left that fought for social justice across the whole United Kingdom. But Labour never operated in tribal Northern Ireland, it has been virtually wiped out by the SNP in Scotland, and in Wales must continually fend off the leftward jabs of Plaid Cymru.

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UnHerd: Why liberal-Left paternalism led to Brexit

For many on the liberal Left, this was incomprehensible – support for Brexit ran counter to the economic interests of the Welsh towns. It was recently reported, for example, that the Leave-supporting town of Llanelli was set to lose one of its manufacturing plants due to the level of economic uncertainty generated by Brexit. Schaeffler, a German manufacturer of automotive, aerospace and industrial parts, announced last month that it would close its Llanelli plant with the loss of up to 220 jobs. [...]

“When I was knocking doors during the referendum campaign in Llanelli people would often say that they didn’t see how leaving Europe would make things any worse, and they liked the idea of shaking things up,” Waters says. “Orthodox economic policies have done too little to give hope to those that are struggling.”[...]

In this sense the EU has often been a lightning rod for a more widespread sense of economic malaise. Conversations about Europe very often bleed into more long-standing narratives of industrial decline. “My own personal view,” said Brian, a former miner at Bryn Colliery who now volunteers in the South Wales Miners’ Museum in Port Talbot, “is that it all started [to go downhill] as soon as we joined the EU”. Brian told me doleful stories about the closure of local pits, the disappearance of industry, and the general sense of malaise that loomed over the Valleys.

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Scientific American: Rising Ethnic Diversity Increases Whites’ Fears

Evidence from social science seems to both refute and support the idea that greater ethnic diversity leads to increased feelings of threat amongst Whites. Proponents of “contact theory” claim that increasing levels of diversity within a community actually reduces prejudice. When Whites are able to build personal relationships with people belonging to a particular ethnic group, and get to know them as close friends or neighbors, contact theory predicts that they will develop a more positive view of members of that ethnic group. However, other studies, such as a famous paper by Harvard’s Robert Putnam, seem to support “threat theory”: as Whites have increasing contact with members of other ethnic groups, they tend to withdraw from their communities and become less trusting of people belonging to other ethnicities.

Until now, these two theories have competed with each other, leaving a lack of clarity about the degree to which ethnic diversity truly leads Whites to feel more threatened. A recently published paper by political scientists Eric Kaufmann and Matthew Goodwin attempts to reconcile these two theories and determine conclusively which one is actually correct. They found that the relationship between ethnic diversity and feelings of threats amongst native-born Whites is mixed: for small communities, contact seems to reduce threat, while in larger communities, more diversity seems to increase it. This suggests that increasing diversity by itself does not necessarily lead to greater wariness amongst Whites; diversity interacts with the size of a community in producing threatened feelings. [...]

Perhaps contact theory is only true in smaller sized neighborhoods because that is where people are most likely to develop close, personal relationships with people who have different backgrounds than themselves. In larger cities, people may be more likely to segregate themselves into their own racial groups. Or perhaps the largeness of a community inherently reduces people’s ability to trust strangers who appear different than themselves. However, this is all speculation, as the study cannot offer a definitive explanation as to what is causing the findings. To answer that question, the researchers plan to undertake additional research that looks more deeply at the conditions under which diversity either does or does not produce a sense of threat amongst Whites.

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openDemocracy: Cable’s confusion – on Brexit imperial “nostalgia” and what it means to be English

For all its historic resentment of its larger southern neighbour, Scotland was as invested in the British Empire as any part of England. From the financial elites to the active colonialists and administrators to the working classes in the shipyards and the protected textile industries, Scots appear to have as much reason to be nostalgic for Empire as most in England. Yet Scotland voted strongly for Remain, as did Northern Ireland. True, Wales voted narrowly for Leave, but much less than England outside London. London, significantly, also voted Remain. [...]

In other parts of Britain, the story was very different. As the empire diminished, other nations wanted to redefine their relationship with the union state. Nationalism rose in Scotland and Wales in broadly progressive forms; violently and tragically in Northern Ireland. Ultimately these pressures led to new governance arrangements, through the creation of elected parliaments and assemblies and devolved administrations. Only in England did the unitary state inherited from Empire remain unchallenged. England is the only part of the UK permanently ruled by the UK government. And England is the only part of the UK not to have enjoyed a real debate about its own identity. [...]

In other parts of Britain, the story was very different. As the empire diminished, other nations wanted to redefine their relationship with the union state. Nationalism rose in Scotland and Wales in broadly progressive forms; violently and tragically in Northern Ireland. Ultimately these pressures led to new governance arrangements, through the creation of elected parliaments and assemblies and devolved administrations. Only in England did the unitary state inherited from Empire remain unchallenged. England is the only part of the UK permanently ruled by the UK government. And England is the only part of the UK not to have enjoyed a real debate about its own identity.

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Independent: Brexit is already raising tough questions about the unity of the United Kingdom itself - and we need answers

These questions are crucial. After all, the Brexit vote has disturbed the devolution settlement. Politics in Northern Ireland have been roiled by the Brexit vote and its aftermath. The referendum triggered a (brief) revival of interest in a second Scottish independence referendum.

There was of course some discussion during the referendum campaign about the potential implications for the unity of the UK. In the weeks prior to the vote, for instance, Tony Blair and John Major, campaigning together in Northern Ireland, warned that a vote to Leave might have a destabilising effect not only in Stormont, but also in Scotland. [...]

Last week, David Lidington set out how the UK government planned to address these criticisms while preserving the integrity of  the UK’s own single market. The swift rejection of his arguments by the Welsh and Scottish governments bore eloquent testimony to the problems inherent in squaring the objectives of Westminster with those of Edinburgh, Cardiff and Stormont. [...]

Meanwhile, new political voices have joined the debate. The newly elected Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, claimed that Brexit should lead to greater devolution to cities and regions across the UK. Inequality, and the inability of London to provide adequately for the rest of the country, were, he argued, key drivers of the  Brexit vote. Moreover, with the Westminster system “grinding to a halt” under the weight of Brexit, it was less able than ever to govern effectively. Tony Travers puts it somewhat differently, arguing that, with central government preoccupied with negotiating Brexit and trade deals around the world, devolution might offer an opportunity for the Government to lighten its load in order to focus on the primary task at hand.

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The Guardian: Welsh and Scottish governments raise pressure over Brexit plans

Both governments are pressing ministers in London to reverse proposals that they say will allow the UK government after Brexit to take unjustified control over key policies with a UK-wide scope, such as farming, fisheries and environmental protection. [...]

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, told BBC Scotland it was very likely Holyrood would refuse to agree to the UK government’s proposals – spelt out by the Cabinet Office minister, David Lidington, on Monday – unless they were radically changed.  [...]

The continuity bill being put before the Welsh assembly is designed to legally transfer EU powers into Welsh legislation, and would be submitted formally if the talks with UK ministers over post-Brexit powers collapse. [...]

Although Sturgeon and Jones have worked together to force changes to the Brexit bill, a split is emerging between the two governments. The Welsh administration appears more optimistic about the prospects of deal. That may reflect the Welsh vote in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum, when Scotland voted heavily in favour of remain, but also Labour’s decision to accept the Brexit vote. In contrast, the Scottish National party remains deeply hostile to Brexit.  

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CityLab: Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-to-Coast Forest

The goal of a thick green ribbon is still a long way off, of course. So far, the government has pledged just an initial £5.7 million of the £500 million needed to fully realize the project. But what’s significant about the plan is that it amps up a transformation that is in fact already underway—it is actually the second major attempt in recent years to re-green the English landscape. [...]

This sounds wonderful—but first, a reality check. If Britain is planning new forests, it’s because the island badly needs them. Overall, the U.K.’s landscape contains one of Europe’s lowest proportions of woodland: just 13 percent. No one expects a populous, heavily developed country like the U.K. to reach the levels of, say Finland, which, at over 73 percent woodland, is Europe’s leafiest country by far. The U.K. trails far behind its more comparable neighbors Belgium (22.6 percent woodland) and France (31 percent), making it look decidedly bare and patchy by comparison. [...]

So far, over 80 percent of this forest area is accessible to the public, making it easy to enjoy for nearby city-dwellers. Indeed, it’s the intimate link with major cities that connects the National and Northern Forests, as both plans create new havens of peace in some of England’s more densely inhabited, city-filled areas.

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Quartz: New research finds the areas of the UK that could be hurt most by Brexit are those that voted for it

While researchers from the University of Birmingham admit it’s difficult to predict the likely long-term impacts of Brexit, they were able to quantify the shares of regional and national GDP and labor income (both in the UK and the EU) that are at risk due to Brexit. As such, researchers found that the Midlands and Northern England (the UK’s economically weaker regions) are particularly vulnerable. In contrast, London and Scotland were far less at risk.

Brexit highlighted deep divides within the UK. While Scotland and London voted to remain in the EU, Northern England and the Midlands, as well as Wales, voted to leave. The study’s finding echo previous research that found that Wales and northeast are among the areas most vulnerable to loss of funding, bad trade agreements, and a shortage of European workers. In short, these areas, which voted to leave the EU, are worst exposed to the economic impact of Brexit. [...]

The UK’s exposure to Brexit is some 4.6 times greater than that of the rest of the EU as a whole. The study estimates that 12% of UK GDP is at risk of Brexit trade-related consequences, compared with 2.64% of EU GDP. The study also notes that if the UK were to leave the EU without a beneficial trade deal in place, or with a deal in which the UK’s access to the block is severely restricted, it would be left in a far more damaging position than the rest of the EU. 

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Politico: Redrawing the Brexit map

Let’s take an imaginary step into an alternate near future, one in which the U.K.’s two largest parties have reshaped themselves along Brexit allegiances. Labour has finally abandoned its ambivalence and swung fully behind Remain. It opposes Brexit at every turn. The Tories, meanwhile, have doubled down on Leave and given up any attempt to lure back soft Remainers [...]

For a start, the political map looks completely different. Based on Chris Hanretty’s estimates of how constituencies voted at the 2016 referendum, the Conservative Party now finds itself in a much, much stronger position, with a majority of around 150. This is because of how the larger number of Leave votes are distributed more widely across Britain’s political map, whereas the smaller number of Remain votes tend to be concentrated in a smaller number of seats.

Across the country, old rules are overturned. The Tories run riot through a large swathe of Labour territory in northern England and Wales, where they were once a toxic brand. Their new leader, Jacob Rees-Mogg, sets out on a celebratory tour, driving through the more than 120 former Labour seats in his vintage 1968 Bentley. [...]

Meanwhile, Labour has finally called a truce with the Scottish National Party and cemented its takeover of London and middle-class enclaves. The party also reaches into parts of the southeast and southwest, including David Cameron’s old seat of Witney. But Labour is firmly out of power. [...]

For the foreseeable future, both parties will have to walk a tight-rope, carefully crafting their messages to pander to uncomfortable coalitions of Remainers and Leavers. As a result, nobody is likely to end up feeling terribly satisfied with what’s on offer.

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Independent: Brexit vote sees highest spike in religious and racial hate crimes ever recorded

Police figures obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests show incidents surged by 23 per cent – from 40,741 to 49,921 – in the 11 months after the EU referendum, compared with the same period the previous year, marking an unparallelled rise.

Eleven of the 32 police forces in England and Wales that responded to the FOI requests saw reports of race and faith-based hate crimes increase by more than 40 per cent, with several regions including Gwent, Nottinghamshire and Kent soaring by more than half in a year. [...]

Gwent in Wales saw the highest increase, with the number of incidents rising by 77 per cent, from 367 to 649. Reports of racially and religiously aggravated hate crimes also rose considerably in Kent (66 per cent, from 874 to 1,452), Warwickshire (65 per cent, 286 to 471) and Nottinghamshire (57 per cent, 681 to 1,071). [...]

Ms Ashraf, who is a member of campaign organisation Stand Up To Racism, said she and her Muslim friends had noticed a marked rise in hate crime against them since the Brexit vote: “I think we’ve seen more since the referendum, there’s no doubt about it. But definitely over the last couple of years we’ve become more cautious when we’re out and about. [...]

“We have seen an increase in the reporting of hate crime in Gwent over the last year. In some respects, this is to be welcomed as hate crimes were traditionally underreported across the UK. It provides a clear indication that people have more confidence in reporting crimes of this nature," Mr Cuthbert told The Independent.

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Quartz: How a belittled, 68-year-old British socialist did the impossible: Get the youth to turn out and vote

Over the last two decades, youth turnout fell from 66% in 1992 to around 40% in the 2015 general election. By contrast, Brits aged 65 have always voted in droves (turnout averages around 75%). The UK has had the largest gap in voter turnout between the old and the young in the OECD.

Corbyn’s bold manifesto promised to ban unpaid internships and cap rents so they would only rise with inflation. He would make universities free again—they were no tuition fees in England and Wales for higher education before 1997—and even hinted at plans to wipe out some student debt.

For campaigners on the ground, it was obvious Corbyn had tapped into the despair that many young people felt in the country. Over the last seven years, tuition fees had tripled; government grants to help the poorest attending universities were axed; under-25s lost their entitlement to housing benefits; the young were squeezed by a spiraling housing market; and job prospects have deteriorating “alarmingly,” according to Britain’s biggest trade union. [...]

In the end, over a million young voters aged up to 25 registered to vote in the run up to the June 8 election. More under-25s have registered to vote than at the same period in the run-up to the Brexit referendum last year and the last general election in 2015.

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The Guardian: Out in the country – rural hotspots found as gay population mapped

Some of the findings are unsurprising: six of the 10 local authorities with the highest relative lesbian, gay and bisexual populations are in inner London, including Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark, while Brighton and Manchester also make the list.

But the county-by-county data puts rural Devon slightly ahead of East Sussex, the county that contains Brighton and Hove. An estimated 1.3% of Devon’s population told researchers they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, slightly ahead of the 1.1% estimated for East Sussex. [...]

By a slender margin, Northern Ireland was the country of the UK found to have the highest proportion of gay men – an estimated 1.6%, compared with 1.5% for England, 1.3% for Wales and 1.1% for Scotland. But it was also the country where women were least likely to say they were lesbian - just 0.3%.

However, some questioned the impact of how the data was collected. “I’m encouraged to see there’s been an increase in people in Northern Ireland identifying as LGB, but this disparity I find really challenging,” said Gavin Boyd, policy manager at the Rainbow Project, a Belfast-based support organisation.

One factor could be a reluctance by women to identify themselves as lesbian, he said. “You’ll find in a lot of places that have experienced armed conflict, the role of women tends to be minimised: post-conflict places tend to be quite macho societies.”

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CityLab: Where Europe's GDP Is Rising And Falling

Most people have a pretty clear idea of which countries in Europe are richer and which are poorer. Income levels thin out the farther south and east you go on the continent, you might assume, while Scandinavia and Germany enjoy the highest income levels. [...]

Overall, wealth is poorly distributed across the European Union, as made clear by March 2016 maps of regional GDP using the latest figures available from Eurostat. Meanwhile, the regions that have seen the largest decreases in per capita GDP aren’t necessarily the ones you’d expect. [...]

The map above, which is adjusted for each nation to show comparable purchasing power, demonstrates how much wealth varies from one region to the next. The former eastern bloc almost universally comes in below average, except for the regions around some of its largest cities: Bucharest, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, and Warsaw. Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland, meanwhile, emerge as the only states where every region exceeds average wealth.

The rest of the continent is an uneven mosaic, especially in the U.K. At the upper end of the scale, three areas are especially wealthy: London, the region around Oxford, and Northern Scotland’s Aberdeenshire (the landing point for the country’s offshore oil and gas extraction). Elsewhere, West Wales and County Durham have a per capita GDP so much lower that it places them in the same category as Southern Italy or Romania.

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