“Criminal Underclass”: I fucking hate that term.

Of course it’s a tragedy that two police officers have lost their lives; the criminals need to be punished. And as I write this, another tragedy has unfolded in Middlesbrough, with a young girl and her auntie losing their lives in a house fire. I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the circumstances of their deaths when we don’t yet know the full details, nor would I want to speculate about something so devastating. But I do want to acknowledge the families and everyone affected, and extend my deepest condolences to those who knew and loved them.

But I fear that this laying down of the law is just a plaster to a problem that has been festering for decades now. Governments, journalists, hell, even other working-class people are sitting right now, scratching their heads, asking, “Where did we go so wrong?”

But as someone born and raised a 25-minute drive from Teesside. I could’ve predicted this would happen.

Teesside itself faces some of the highest child poverty and deprivation rates in the UK, with overall relative child poverty in the Tees Valley area reaching 31.3%. It seems as though Teesside only tops deprivation league tables, with unemployment being higher than the national average and the crime rate being the highest in England. I could bore you with the statistics, but I’m sure we’re all familiar with Teesside’s downfall; the press never fails to remind us.

Growing up in this region, the only time I saw my town and neighbouring towns and cities mentioned in national media was to tell us how much we’d failed.

How shit the place we called home was.

How poor we were.

How dangerous we were.

How deprived we were.

It was always: “Look how bad Teesside is!” It was rarely: “How did it get this way, and what the fuck are we going to do about it?”

When an area is stripped of its industry, investment, and opportunities over generations, you cannot act surprised when the consequences become impossible to ignore.

When I saw the news of the tragic crash involving two police officers and five young men from Middlesbrough, I knew, to some extent, the type of environment these lads had grown up in. And please don’t misconstrue my words as condoning any of this behaviour. I don’t.

But I grew up surrounded by boys from estates like these. I shared playgrounds with them. I shared classrooms with them. I knew lads whose lives were being shaped by circumstances far bigger than themselves before they were old enough to understand what any of it meant. I’ve lived, and continue to have ties to, estates where these boys grew up, where their families still live, and where generations have experienced the same cycle of deprivation. And I know for a fact most of these lads are now in and out of Holme House monthly, if not yearly.

I found myself, a day after the crash hit headlines, asking myself, “I grew up on the same estate as these lads. Why have I not ended up like this?” But I guess that’s an ignorant way of looking at things. Because even though I grew up on a council estate and times were hard, I was incredibly lucky not to share some of the same experiences as my peers.

I grew up around bairns who couldn’t afford sanitary pads. Bairns with parents in prison. Bairns whose only meal of the day was a school dinner. Bairns who constantly had head lice because they weren’t taught basic personal hygiene. Bairns looking after younger siblings while their parents went out on the session. I was lucky to have some form of stability. I had that support system around me who gave me a safety net. I really think that’s something we often forget when we talk about working-class people who “made it out”. We love a good bootstrap story.

Look, they grew up poor, and they turned out alright!

But what about the people who didn’t? What happened when those kids reached the end of school and were spat out into the world with no support system, no meaningful opportunities, and no validation from educational or personal achievements?

And I think Middlesbrough-born presenter Steph McGovern articulated this far better than I could in a post following the tragedy.

She wrote:

“For some in these communities, crime is all they know. It is the only place they get validation, self-worth, and a seemingly sustainable income. Criminals exploit this and groom vulnerable young people into gangs. Then social media validates this for them.”

She then goes on to make a point which, for me, is crucial:

“None of this excuses their behaviour, but it is important context to help explain why it is so prolific.”

McGovern also pointed out something else that gets completely lost when Middlesbrough becomes a national punchline: there are “lots of hardworking people in Middlesbrough who are appalled by the crimes of some in their community.”

Most people are sick of the terrible headlines. People are sick of watching their home reduced to statistics. People who are sick of outsiders talking about Boro as though everyone who lives here is either a criminal, a victim or some sort of case study.

Because Middlesbrough is not its crime statistics. It isn’t its deprivation rankings. It isn’t five dead young lads or two dead police officers. It isn’t a national news headline.

Like any place, it is what you make it.

People running businesses. Making art. Raising bairns. Working long tedious shifts. Looking after their families. Trying to build lives in a place that has spent decades being told that it is a failure. For God’s sake, Boro literally gave us the parmo and Bob Mortimer.

There are thousands of working-class young people slipping through the net all over the country. Teesside just hits home for me because it’s a place I’ve called home for most of my life.

Being from the North East, I know what it’s like to grow up somewhere that constantly gets talked about as though it is a problem to be solved rather than a community full of people. And I also know that there isn’t going to be one magic solution to this.

The next steps to prevent this behaviour are complicated, expensive, and a long road. But they need to be taken seriously if we want to see any meaningful change.

We need investment. We need genuine employment opportunities. We need properly funded youth services. We need youth centres. We need rehabilitation programmes. We need support for families before they reach a crisis point. And no, none of this is cheap. But neither is allowing communities to deteriorate until the only response left is an emergency one.

We currently have a Prime Minister who loves to talk about his northern identity. But he needs to realise the North doesn’t just stop at Manchester.

The North is Middlesbrough.

It’s Redcar.

It’s Stockton.

It’s Hartlepool.

It’s Darlington.

It’s Sunderland.

It’s towns, cities, and pit villages all over this country that were once the beating heart of British industry and have spent decades being asked to survive on scraps. You cannot keep telling these places to be proud of their northern identity while refusing to give them the investment required to build a future.

So yes, we do need to talk about Boro.

“Is this AI?” someone comments on my most recent article. My cheeks start to get hot, my heart sinks, and tears prickle in my eyes. Hours of writing, research, and passion all reduced to a single comment questioning whether my writing was actually written by a robot - and one that’s killing the planet at that.

You may be wondering why that particular comment riled me up so much, and I must admit, for the longest time it didn’t bother me, but recently, every single time we post an article on RADGE Magazine socials, without fail someone will comment asking if the piece is AI. Upon speaking to other writers and journalists, it’s become apparent that it’s not just our publication that’s getting these accusations. It seems as though we’ve become inept at partaking in any nuance as a society.

AI is a model that learns patterns by feeding vast amounts of human writing into the system, years’ worth of works by a spectrum of academics, writers, and journalists. The more developed it gets, the more the telltale signs of AI assistance are blurred. How can we truly tell the difference anymore with confidence? Accusing people of using AI has increasingly become a modern-day witch hunt. Imagine the fella from Horrible Histories who shouted, “witch she’s a witch!” but instead it’s just some chronically online person accusing someone of using AI with actually no evidence; they’re clearly just bored and want to feel morally superior online for 20 minutes.

It’s quite clear when AI is used to create artwork: the font, the weird yellow colours, the hands which aren’t quite right. But in comparison to written work, the usual “tell-tale signs” are just elements people have been using in written work for like ever. Whilst AI artwork outwardly has flaws that are easily picked up on, AI-assisted writing is much trickier territory. Of course I’d never use AI for either. But I’ve found myself, as of late, subconsciously second-guessing my work as I write: should I use this em dash? Can I use the phrasing “and honestly,” or will people think I’m using AI? And honestly (wink wink), it hinges completely on my creative process. AI itself isn’t just ruining creativity, but the constant witch hunt is also slowly making the process both unenjoyable and tedious.

We platform a multitude of writers from all sorts of backgrounds here at RADGE, but one thing they all have in common is that they’re working-class, and most of us at some point have written about our working-class experience. I can’t help but think that sometimes these allegations come from people finding it hard to comprehend that working-class people are eloquently conveying their own lived experiences. I can’t help but wonder whether we’d be quite so quick to question the authenticity of that writing if it appeared in The Times or The Telegraph? AI has created a bizarre environment where genuine human writing is now being treated with suspicion, and that suspicion can be particularly revealing when it’s directed at working-class writers.

This raises the question: whose writing do we instinctively consider credible? I spent five years in higher education. I graduated with a first-class honours degree. I’ve grafted my arse off for most of my adult life, yet because I’ve used a semicolon in an article, you’re now, without a shred of evidence, claiming I’ve used AI to write an entire article. I know full well that if our articles were littered with spelling and grammar mistakes, the finger would be pointed at us for being unprofessional. So, basically, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

If a working-class writer suddenly writes beautifully about their own experience, why is the reaction sometimes “AI wrote this” rather than “this person is a good writer”? Why is eloquence so easily treated as evidence of artificiality when it comes from people we don’t necessarily expect to be eloquent?

Well, of course, you still got to feel morally superior for five minutes. So I suppose there’s that.

When writer Emily Boertien published a beautifully poignant article detailing the fatphobic abuse and scrutiny that female celebrities, particularly CMAT, experience, it went viral. You would think this would be a proud moment, but instead, it was overshadowed by a slew of comments that ignored the article’s content and questioned its authenticity.

“When CMAT shared one of my essays earlier this year, it should have been one of those moments where I just got to be proud of something I’d written. It came from a place of pure anger and frustration, and that sort of just enhanced the writing process. Very much emotionally driven. The response was overwhelmingly positive, but unfortunately the one or two comments asking whether it was AI were the ones that lodged themselves in my brain. It’s a uniquely deflating experience pouring your own thoughts, feelings, and personality into a piece of writing only to have someone suggest they didn’t actually come from you. It’s so much harder for people to tell as opposed to the trend of calling out ‘AI slop’ in posters and artwork. As a writer, I do feel we’re at a point where perfectly normal sentence structures, punctuation, or turns of phrase are treated as evidence of AI, as though humans didn’t invent them in the first place.”

I think the biggest question that comes out of this debate is: what happens when we can’t tell anymore? If AI can convincingly imitate human writing, and humans are increasingly being accused of producing AI writing, what happens to the concept of authenticity? Where do we go from here?

We’ve recently seen platforms such as Substack using AI detection models like Pangram, and whilst helpful in theory, these systems can be extremely inaccurate, flagging the most bizarre of sentence structures as AI. Pangram flagged one of my articles as 33% AI-generated for using the words “howay Newcastle” and using a semicolon. A semicolon. But what happens if I start removing the parts of my writing that get flagged? If I stop using semicolons, avoid certain phrases, and rewrite sentences that a detection model considers “too AI”, am I actually making my writing more authentic? Or am I just learning how to write in a way that satisfies an algorithm?

As the great Alanis Morissette said, isn’t it ironic? We’re altering our writing styles to prove to machines we’re human. Authentic writing is becoming less about the story and more about an unfounded AI purity test, that being by both the system and randomers on Instagram.

Resident radgie and journalist Maia Olusanya said it perfectly, “What people don’t comprehend is that there’s something deeply exhausting about sitting for hours over your laptop second-guessing everything you write for fear of people thinking a program did it. I mean, people seem to forget that AI is based on human behaviors and language patterns, so for the most part it’s AI copying writers, not the other way around! Plus, AI absolutely cannot bitch and moan and feel passion as I do, so where’s the fun in that?”

So where do we go from here? I don’t bloody know, I wish I did. Maybe we need to check our prejudices, stop the witch hunts, stop seeing the conspiracies behind everything, and trust your mates. It’s a hard one when this technology, whether you agree with it or not, is here to stay, so where do we draw the line? To reflect Maia’s and Emily’s words, AI can’t bitch, moan, feel angry, or horny, and even more so, AI can’t get radge, so you’ll just have to take our word for it!

I have thought that my tolerance for rudeness is lower because I am from the Northeast, and we tend to be a friendly bunch. We are also given the stereotype that we are loud, confrontational, and argumentative because we say it as it is. Who wants to be a pushover anyway? There are definitely instances where I have been too direct. And there are instances where I have given people the benefit of the doubt and should have ‘protected my peace’ more. However, I have seen people being labelled as ‘difficult’ for putting their foot down, ‘controlling’ for saying no, and ‘defensive’ when they are just protective.

Why has every reaction been boiled down to a psychological framework?

I partly blame some influencers and COVID. Not that COVID invented our interest in mental health, but it pushed our private emotional lives online. Therapy, friendship, dating and work were all pixels on our screens. If you lived alone, then it was even more prevalent. We’d finish work, if you were still employed, clap for the NHS; check our phones with our base level of stress and fear now significantly higher; and be told that we are doing just fine, we are all still girl-bossing the pandemic, and we are all just experiencing a trauma response. Our mental health was diagnosed through an Instagram carousel created by someone who had no diagnosable powers at all.

The stigma around talking about mental health continued to erode, which is a fantastic thing. No one wants to go back to a generation of sucking everything up and believing emotions aren’t real. However, alongside this erosion, something else grew into its own vicious beast. Our Instagram began telling us how to set boundaries, our TikTok became flooded with trauma experts, and influencers became the most qualified people to diagnose us. It is great that we can discover what may be affecting us so easily; however, there are no qualified avenues for help on our social media. Psychology via social media is lucrative content, and we suddenly became a generation that treats people badly because an infographic told us to.

A 2026 study comparing psychology research with Reddit discussions found that psychology-related terms have semantically changed online. The words are surviving, but the definitions don’t, and this really matters because of the authority the words hold. The way these specific people talk is not because they are angry; who cares about that? Humans have been telling each other to fuck off since the dawn of time, and it can be quite cathartic. The problem we have developed is what happens when the argument is conducted in the language of therapy. All of a sudden, you are not just being accused of behaving badly. You are suddenly in a courtroom being analysed. The way you acted and are now reacting is being monitored to build out what one can only assume resembles a shoddy CAMHS assessment.

This is something I experienced firsthand, and when sending screenshots around so people could have a giggle, I was hit with “the worst person you know has learnt therapy talk”. And that is literally it. A person I met for roughly 5 hours had sent me a series of messages, unprovoked, that felt like being handed the findings of a psychological assessment from AI that I had never consented to having.

The results of my assessment were that I was abusive, manipulative, and delusional. I’ll take the delusional; I do genuinely believe Girls Aloud are the greatest girl group to ever live and that Anthony Gordon is a young Clare Balding clone. The rest was laughable but dangerously wrong. I was financially abusive because I expected someone not to spend too much money before an expensive holiday. I was controlling because I said I would break up with someone for calling women bitches. I was insane and jealous because I was going to show up to a gig I was invited to by another group of friends. And crazy because I rolled my eyes at the mention of an ex-partner’s cat. I personally still think I would have been crazier if I wasn’t any of the above.

Anyhow, I was now psychologically abusive, and when I answered back, with all the evidence in the world and other people’s testimony, I was ‘making myself the victim’, and they could ‘see through’ me. Bearing in mind I’d met this person for a total of 5 hours out of my entire 27 years on this planet.

There is a particular kind of power in being told not only what you did but also why you did it by someone who doesn’t know you at all, who decided to have an issue with you before they even met you. Claiming you see through someone and know why they act a certain way leaves very little room for disagreements. If you deny it, you are a liar. If you explain yourself, you are making excuses. If you object to the accusation, you are being defensive, and don’t you dare seem sad, or else you are a victim!

If you are sent one of these ChatGPT-ified psych evaluations, there is no possible response that isn’t absorbed into the accusations themselves, and these days, once someone has diagnosed you, you no longer have an argument. Now when you are being a divvy at 1 am after a few drinks, and your mates aren’t talking to you because you’ve called one of their Mams a slag, you can quickly put your feelings online and be told that you aren’t the problem; they are because they are denying your self-expression and triggering your abandonment wound.

I find the whole thing exhausting and troubling. It is more than simply being irritated by people saying ‘protect your peace’ for the 700th time. Every crappy interaction can be translated into a psychological diagnosis, so there is no room for human error. We are increasingly comfortable with the idea that someone’s worst moment tells us who they fundamentally are. Once a label has stuck, everything else they do is further evidence. I am not arguing that people should have to tolerate abusive behaviour; I didn’t tolerate receiving messages like that, and there are situations worth walking away from, cutting contact, and, yes, ‘protecting your peace’.

Accountability isn’t bad. Quite the opposite. Being able to tell someone that they have hurt you is an important part of having relationships with others; however, accountability means allowing someone to apologise and not psychologically diagnosing them. It seems that nobody gets to be a person for very long before they become a case study.

We want to control how people behave, react, and speak so we can keep ourselves on our high horses and act as if anyone who behaves slightly ‘odd’ is beneath us. Not everyone who has standards in a relationship is controlling, not everyone who doesn’t deal with being spoken over is a narcissist, and not everyone who behaves badly is irredeemably toxic. You can dislike somebody without needing a psychological explanation for why, and most importantly, you can be wrong about someone without needing to construct an entire theory of their personality to justify it.

For a little while, I worried about what was said about me and picked everything up as if I were ITV’s Vera, because the psychological terminology really hounded down the message, but then I realised I just don’t really care all that much for people like that. It is sadly how so many people are, even people who are in positions of power, and the endless hours we spend on social media are really giving us the power to diagnose and stopping us from being able to have constructive conversations, build relationships, and actually hold space for people in our lives. It has become so normalised to treat people horribly in order to have a boundary or be at peace.

In the end, we really don’t need to be diagnosing everyone we dislike. Not every friendship and relationship needs to be reduced down to an attachment style, and not every reaction needs to be justified by a trauma response. Not everyone needs to be cancelled, analysed, or sent to the gallows. We are allowed to be complicated, be wrong, apologise, learn and move on. Instead of reaching for infographics telling us what to do, we should use our brains and remember that sometimes the person in front of us doesn’t need to be diagnosed. They’re just a person who can be a dickhead.

A quick disclaimer: I’m writing this as my own reflection on one night volunteering with Women’s Street Watch in Newcastle, not on behalf of the organisation or its volunteers. They were kind enough to let me join them, and everything that follows is my own opinion.

Last Friday I volunteered with Women’s Street Watch in Newcastle City Centre, Bigg Market to be specific – Newcastle’s strip filled with bars, clubs, restaurants and even a Hooters! Women’s Street Watch (WSW) was established in 2021, with the aim to keep women and girls safe. Their equipment includes a van, gazebo, fairy lights, pink camping chairs and gorgeous pink high-vis vests. Even without the aesthetic set up, their mission is simple: to reduce strain on emergency services, reduce instances of sexual violence and harassment, along with providing training and guidance to empower women within the community.

As a woman, it’s not particularly difficult to imagine why the group was explicitly set up after the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa. Yet, why is it that when I was volunteering with WSW, a young man ask “Why women? What about men?” The question surprised me because WSW exists for a reason.

Women are significantly more likely than men to experience sexual assault, and the overwhelming majority of people prosecuted for sexual offences are men. In their five years of operations, WSW have intervened in seven incidents involving active sexual violence. That number might sound relatively small until you remember that this is a volunteer community project without whom some of those incidents might never have been reported.

Let’s get something clear. Sexual violence against men is real and serious. Protecting men’s mental health is real and serious. Suicide is the leading cause of death among men under 50 in the UK, with the North East experiencing the highest suicide rate of any English region. That is real and serious. Acknowledging those facts, however, does not require every woman’s safety initiative to justify why it focuses on women. Two truths can exist, and they don’t always need to be intertwined.

What stayed with me most from that night was not the question itself but the space around it. The question was asked on one side of the WSW van, and on the other, a man was sitting in the camp chairs enjoying some cheesy chips. The service is there to make everyone safer; there is nothing about the service that prevents men from asking for help. In fact, I experienced the opposite.

I was struck by how comfortable men seemed taking up space. Many women would walk past and praise the group, shouting “YES GIRLS!” and one lass gave an empowered speech about how amazing WSW were. Interjecting with “yes I’m mortal,” she described how great it was that community support like this existed, and while she didn’t need it tonight, she might one night and felt safer knowing the group was there. I think this lass should have a career in politics, by the way, it was a very impassioned speech – genuinely, I had tears in my eyes.

While they often stopped to speak in passing by complimenting the group’s efforts, I noticed that women only stopped and sat down if they genuinely needed something, like asking for flip-flops, water, or a phone charger. On the other hand, upon returning from a patrol (a walk up around the area to see if anyone needed help), to find a group of middle-aged lads in the chairs sitting down to eat their kebabs. What surprised me was how readily they seemed to occupy the space.

They didn’t do anything wrong; they were canny enough lads, and other WSW volunteers didn’t seem bothered (this probably happens every shift), but I couldn’t stop thinking about the difference I had witnessed between using a space because you need it and assuming a space is yours because it is available.

What I observed that evening got me thinking about something much bigger than local women’s safety. Perhaps this isn’t the right moment to be asking it, but isn’t it time we stopped pandering to men? I’m aware that conversations around gender are becoming increasingly polarised, and opportunities for nuance seem to be shrinking by the day, but reader, I’m TIREDDDD.

Tired of giving men the benefit of the doubt. Tired of having to explain how the patriarchy also harms men and that feminism aims to abolish all forms of oppression. Tired of having to defend women’s equality movements and why they are still needed, against the “what about men?!” comments. As fellow Radge writer Sameena wrote last month in her article about sexualising GTA characters:

“As a women, the narrative that men’s mental health isn’t cared about enough is pushed on me constantly, and it is only brought up when I talk about women’s health.”

By pandering, I don’t mean that we should stop caring about men. I have a younger brother who I adore, male friends and colleagues who I respect, and an amazing step-dad, all of whom I care about deeply. However, is it time to reduce the seemingly endless expectation that women should make room for men’s feelings, experiences, and concerns whenever we talk about our own?

Maybe that is what has been bothering me about conversations around feminism lately. Women have spent generations being told to make ourselves smaller and take up less space. Our needs are regularly unmet or completely ignored in workplaces, public spaces, and doctors’ offices, to name a few (hello medical misogyny!). Heck, up until 1982 pubs could legally refuse to serve women (going for a pint is more feminist than we previously thought – we love to see it).

Yet now that we are beginning to experience independence on a wider scale and occupying space (politically, economically, sexually, socially, etc) – there seems to be an increasing insistence that we should remember to leave some of it for men, despite still existing within dominant patriarchal systems. The pessimist in me wonders whether some of this backlash is because women’s independence threatens the sense of status, entitlement, or control that has been historically available to men.

Perhaps I’m projecting, but I wonder if this is partly why we are seeing ‘nun girl summer’ becoming a trend this year. Gone are the days of ‘hot girl summer’ or ‘brat summer’, this year, some women are decentring men and entering their celibate era, in search of peace. I’ll admit that this article was also inspired by a much less political development: a disappointing situationship where the guy failed to communicate (or failed to even realise until after we’d slept together…) that he wasn’t ready to date. I guess I’m just tired of giving men the benefit of the doubt and including them within my justification of feminist action, when I don’t receive the same respect and thoughtfulness back.

Men, are you learning about the patriarchy and the ways in which it also harms men? Do you know just how much invisible labour women do? Do you know how to find the clitoris, or do you need a tour guide? Are you challenging your mates when they make sexist jokes? Are you checking in on your friend and creating a sense of community to protect men’s mental health?

I hope you can answer yes to the above. But increasingly, I don’t think it should be my job to make sure that you are.

To conclude, I don’t want men to have less. I just don’t think women being seen and protected should require us to give something back. Women have spent long enough making ourselves smaller, quieter and more accommodating. Maybe it’s time we set up camp in a chair at Women’s Street Watch, grab a kebab from Munchies, slip into a pair of flip-flops, and stop apologising for taking up space.

In the years since, an inkling of opportunity began to simmer. Flood water that is sitting inside coal mines, warmed by the Earth’s natural temperature, is now being tapped as a continuous, low-carbon source of heat.

“It seems quite romantic and exciting,” said Ewan Gibbs, a professor at the University of Glasgow. Coal mining once employed more than one million workers across Britain and, despite being a gruelling job, it fostered life-long camaraderie, staunch workers’ rights campaigns and a culture that outlived the coal face.

Former mining communities experience what Gibbs, who is an energy, industry and labour historian, refers to as “critical nostalgia”. They recognise the economic benefits, good jobs and sense of community the industry brought while also seeing its dangers, environmental harm and personal losses.

Using sites of extraction in a sustainable, renewable way to benefit former colliery communities offers a chance to reclaim the legacy of coal mining, which was distorted by biased media coverage of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, where 165,000 workers came out against the planned closure of their livelihoods.

Gateshead is home to the UK’s first functional scheme that takes advantage of geothermally warmed coal mine flood water. Launched back in 2017, it heats homes via a district heating network. The hope is that similar programmes will be rolled out at former collieries across the country.

Coal pits effectively function as a battery, keeping water at around 20 degrees celsius all-year round. To tap into it, engineers must repierce the Earth once hollowed out by miners and pump water to its surface, where it is treated, and its temperature is increased. Clean, hot water then flows through the miles of pipes which make up Gateshead’s district heating network.

Some 350 homes and buildings are connected to the network, in a region where one in four people live below the poverty line, but the scheme’s success has national recuperations. Heat accounts for 40% of energy use and 37% of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, highlighting how alternative sources of heat can have a material impact on the climate crisis and justice. A “Living Laboratory” for mine water heat research was also set up in Gateshead to further understand its potential.

Looking out for my marra

The last deep coal mine closed in 2015 in the Yorkshire town of Killingley; the North East’s shuttered much earlier. The annual Durham Miners Gala, however, still lures 200,000 people from across the region and country in a show of shared values and solidarity, of workplace struggle and organisation.

“The tie to the land and also their working environment, it’s too strong and can’t really be easily replicated in other working environments,” said Jingyi Li, a researcher at Manchester University’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. “The solidarity, and class, they all share with their marras,” she added, referring to the north eastern word for friend that has its roots in the mines.

“That’s what’s so special about mine water heat: it’s a social intervention as much as a climate one. It has the potential to address energy equity and inclusivity challenges in the energy transition”, said Li, who spent time in the North East on field research while studying the scheme.

“It’s a very local resource; it is only tied to the former coalfields. You can’t find mine water anywhere else,” Li said, adding, “It’s directly linked to the people living on that land. So this is very unique; it’s not universal. It can reshape how energy is developed, or what kind of energy can be owned.”

Pride is not tied to the coal. It is tied to a humid, dark and risky working environment that was described by Orwell as his “own mental picture of hell”, but was honest work and demanded a high level of skill and resilience. Former miners “are keen to see that this place is not being forgotten,” Li added.

The industry’s mismanaged decline, however, left only spoils in its wake, and the region hasn’t fully recovered. Coal water heat can be a catalyst for change, a way to honour legacies while addressing modern and local needs, Li said.

It’s more than a technical pivot: the North East’s wealth was extracted and exported in coal’s heyday, marking an early indication of a pattern that would become entrenched. Today, the region is treated as a reservoir of cheap labour and manufacturing capacity. Still, promises of economic revival rarely materialise — think hydrogen hubs, Britishvolt, successive waves of lacklustre government promises, including Levelling Up. These scars are reflected in miners’ scepticism and low trust towards how schemes are run, Li said.

However, Gateshead’s district heating network has now notched years of operation, and it’s built on technology of the past, not shiny new innovations.

Keeping benefits local

Possible effects of the scheme are already documented, both good and bad. A 2025 academic paper written by Li and her colleagues stressed that the mine water-fuelled district heating is worth pursuing as a social intervention in and of itself, regardless of environmental benefits. It warned that a narrow climate focus could sideline “equitable energy access and community well-being”, — which risks history repeating itself.

“As a former coal miner, the mine water heating scheme could be a great solution […] to make use of the natural geothermal energy in the area,” Li’s paper notes, quoting an interviewee. “It is exciting to see such innovative ideas to benefit the communities and the environment,” they continued. Another noted that “they were very proud of the fact that this scheme was being developed as a sort of legacy of the coal mining history.”

Whether or not a renewed sense of purpose, pride and power — both literally and metaphorically — will materialise is wrapped up in ownership and governance.

Gibbs probed: Would mine water district heating networks, as they scale, be owned by the national government, regional authorities, local councils or the community itself? Who pulls the strings affects whether residents will see direct advantages of new initiatives, such as cheaper bills or profits being reinvested into the community.

Most of the UK’s wind farms, for example, are owned by multinationals or foreign investors. The industry’s early promises of lower energy prices and employment, especially in manufacturing, have generally failed to materialise.

Similar projects in the Netherlands, Germany and Canada are locally owned or at least locally run. Canada’s network in Springhill, Nova Scotia, was the first in the world to use mine water heating back in the late 1980s, offering a tried-and-tested playbook for scaling and maintaining such infrastructure while keeping benefits local.

Miners typically didn’t have a direct stake in the pits, but their collective action and formidable trade unions did move the needle on labour rights, giving them significant involvement in how the mines were run. It was this unity that the community above ground was built on.

Gateshead’s scheme is run by an energy company, aptly named Gateshead Energy Company, which is wholly owned by the council. District heating is a centralised system — with the coal pit once again sat at the helm — controlled by heat interface units that replace gas boilers.

Once connected to a district heating network, participants tend to be locked in and can’t swap between utilities to chase better deals. Gateshead Council promises 5% cheaper bills than market rates, incentivising participation while lowering barriers to sustainable heat sources.

This is critical amid a global energy crisis. Instead of lining the pockets of Big Oil CEOs, who have raked in record profits since the war in the Middle East that has disrupted the flow of fossil fuels, such a district heating network can keep profits local. With a newly-elected Reform council, which gripped control of the local authority after 52 years of Labour, this energy security narrative will no doubt become crucial in the longevity of green schemes.

In all, Gibbs sees the rise of mine water district heating as a chance to rethink coal’s legacy and ensure geothermal embodies the spirit of its predecessor.

“There are optimistic stories of material improvements that were done on a collective basis, and a story of government often intervening to make the industry safer and run in the interests of workers, communities, but also the public at large,” he said. “Those are inspirations that should be applied to geothermal but also to the wider renewable sector.”

He added, “What do we think the legacies of coal actually are? What do we want them to be?”

Sweaty warehouse nights and hidden venues down alleys or at the back of Japanese restaurants have always existed to provide a safe space where we can be ourselves. Nowhere else have I waited to piss and spoken to a drag queen, a tradie just coming off shift, a straight couple celebrating their engagement and a furry. None of us feeling threatened by the other, and all of us just there for a good time. Homobloc provides this space, in the middle of a growing city, where LGBTQ+ and straight people are fearing for the future ahead.

There are so many conflicting stories of what we consider the origin of raving to be. Was Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse in 1977 the start? Did the nights we love so much really start with the inception of house music? Synonymous with its 4/4 beat, dance tempos, and disco/soul influence. Or was it before then? Or after? Was it when Acid House began or when the Berlin Wall came down? Was it in the melting pot of London? Or further north? In Manchester, at the Hacienda, or Birmingham, where Detroit influences began leaking in? Is the type of night we want in the UK actually based on what the Rez introduced in the North East? Non-stop, 20-hour-long raves with a plethora of subgenres.

None of us really know, or we at least can’t exactly pinpoint it, but it is clear what a rave really is. It is a sense of belonging, a signifier of a place and where you might be from. In whatever form your rave takes, whether it’s in abandoned bridge towers, warehouses, the gay club or your mate’s living room, it is a local place, space and identity signifier. It is what Homoelectric is, and it is what Homobloc has slowly become.

Homobloc is the massive extension of much-beloved Homoelectric, which began in 1997 as a reaction to what Una saw as an increasingly homogenised gay scene. It was a pretty simple idea: Una wanted the nights to return to the messy, sweaty, exciting feeling that had made club culture so special. Get rid of the commercial polish and the constant renditions of Madonna, and return to the roots. Clearly, the idea worked, as twenty-nine years later, the question on everyone’s lips is whether you are going to Homobloc or not.

The venue, Mayfield Depot, is enormous, mostly concrete and brick and still rough around the edges. Built from two other things that make our country great: our train stations and the Royal Mail. But now it is for 10,000 people to pile into for its sprawling sound system. It does feel like exactly the kind of place Homoelectric has always belonged in, with four rooms, multiple performances and a day that stretches into the early hours.

Honey Dijon, Kim Petras, DJ Gigola, Cobrah, local legend DJ Paulette, and a whole host of names fill a poster to the brim; it looks less like a festival booking and more like a wishlist in a venue big enough to contain it. The international names are obviously exciting, but the inclusion of local DJs and performers, too is incredible. Being able to see some of the biggest names in the industry alongside people you have rubbed shoulders with, supported on free weeknight events or just silently supported on social media, is what makes Homobloc special. Manchester has never needed permission from anywhere else in the world to have a scene of its own and to make it special.

Homobloc isn’t trying to be a fake, manufactured idea of what queer nightlife should look like, nor is it a copy-and-paste event from elsewhere. There isn’t a dress code, there isn’t a hierarchy of who belongs and who doesn’t, and there is no attempt to make it palatable to those outside of it. The entire point is that everyone gets to come in, experience something new or familiar, and have a good time. Which is pretty relevant when the wider conversation around LGBTQ+ life at the moment is often reduced to arguments, statistics and headlines. Queer spaces are either discussed in terms of what they are under threat from or what some people on the right think they are a threat to. Social media and the news are rife with discussions about who is allowed to exist, what rights people have/don’t have and constant reports of violence against minorities. It is so important to be able to have a space where people can just come and have a good time. It is good for the soul.

Una is honest that Homobloc is not something that will change the world; a room full of people dancing together doesn’t solve anything or fix the state of world politics on the outside of the concrete dance hall. But for almost an entire day, Una has offered us something that feels increasingly difficult to find elsewhere and given a lot of people a space in Manchester to feel at home. Not just with Homobloc, but the years of Homoelectric too.

The feeling that everyone has temporarily agreed to leave their shit at the door is what raving has always been about. Not where it was started or who gets to claim the first beat, or even who dances correctly or doesn’t; it is simply about being where the music is and everyone in the room being part of the same thing.

Homobloc feels like a very Manchester answer to a very prevalent, modern problem. When the outside world gets even more divided, and the dickheads shout the loudest, just make somewhere noisy enough to drown them out, and that is what Homobloc is allowing us to do.

Homobloc kicks off on Saturday, 26th September 2026, and we hope to see you all there. Find us on the dance floor, but it’s probably best to just dance alongside us and leave the conversation until Monday.

Wise men say the North Star leads to candy-striped red and white dreams, bright-white camera lights, and blue suede shoes swapped for studded footy boots. So, I follow! Lights, camera, Friday night! I trek the path to Glitterball in clopping heels – gold and navy neon club signs flash overhead, and there’s a trail of candy-coloured bubblegum stomped into stars on the pavement beneath me.

But there! A grand sign of the city! It lights up the navy night! I pose below it: the luminous white England flag that swings and beams brightly atop a broken lamppost. Ah, SunderWood. Here, blanketed by Elvis tunes crackling out of Gatsby’s open door, I wonder if my mother would consider that I’ve made it.

I say Sunlun in 2024, The Telegraph says, “one of the worst cities to visit in the UK.” (LOL). But I say Sunlun today, and gentrification enters the conversation. A gentrification so shiny, so almighty, that more and more allusions pull parallels between Sunderland and Northern Hollywood-isms. Don’t you find that believable? Ugh, well, picture this.

On the backdrop of a town mottled with negative press and prejudice, Sunderland has had a tough wrap. But, come the clicker-board of Crown Works Studios, and suddenly, a film of hope has loaded into the hearts and cameras of people in our region. So guys, first stop! Take a look over here, and you’ll see the slopes and peaks of what has been referred to as a “blockbuster development” for the region. Yes, one of the biggest film studios in the North East of England, Crown Works Studios, offers a solid gold glimpse of entertainment production, one that once felt half the world away.

A region so upheld by the “greatest strength [of its] people… [where] individuals and organisations [drive] innovation and [create] opportunity for future generations,” – according to a report by the North East Chamber of Commerce back in June – the ability to finally utilise that spirit arrives as a beacon of Hollywood-esque hope. And, come this investment for the creative industries, alongside Sunderland City Council leader, Councillor Michael Mordey’s belief that this will “[unleash] the immense potential of our region,” the Sunderland scene is set for filmic reckoning.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve traded grit for glitz.

Now, take a look to our right, folks! See Kielder Forest spanning densely in its green glory? It too doubles as a filming location for Danny Boyle’s horror, ‘28 Years Later.’ Look further, and you might spy Beamish Museum. A quintessential Northern artery aching with the lifeblood of our region, it, again, doubles as a filming location for the 2025 film, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day,’ starring Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall, and Haley Bennett. And I could chat for hours about how the backdrop of our bountiful region has played starring roles under starry film-crew spotlights. I could even dive deep into the feat of the River Tees, having folded and flowed in Sam Mendes’ 2019 war-epic, ‘1917.’ We’ll continue our SunderWood tour, but did you know that said river flows (surely) to the sea?

Right, anyway, so it goes that even pertinent Presley-isms seep into our city. As we near the end of our tour, you can catch a flash of SunderWood merchandise! Find it in the form of Sunderland Football Club’s Hummel Away Shirt 2026-27. The watermelon gumdrop coloured kit seeps into regional fanaticism, whilst building a bridge from Sunderland to the Hollywood-isms connoted in Elvis aesthetics and pop culture references; call it a Keel Bridge crossing of sorts, from our city to Moviedom. Even in SAFC’s promotional video for the kit, the vignette of retro, strawberry-coloured Cadillacs trawling Sunderland streets seems more cinematic than stereotyped Sunlun. And in seeing the team assemble on the pitch, the banding of the kit connotes a deeper connection in which the region channels its love of the arts into its foundations (a la, footy club). This is evident in the fact that “the region has always been full of creativity, resilience and brilliant storytelling,” according to Allison Gwynn, Chief Executive at North East Screen. And so, our love of the arts and our steps towards success in this realm are embodied in corners of our shared home. Here, Hollywood-isms hide.

But as the credits roll on our SunderWood reflections, in the darkness of gentrification, behind the newly-tarmacked and freshly painted streets, there’s another thread tying us to Tinseltown. That being, a thriving underbelly of stark inequality hiding beneath the surface of success. Back in October last year, Sunderland City Council reported that child poverty remains a significant issue in the city, with one in three of the city’s children living in relatively low-income families after housing costs. Furthermore, figures provided by the North East Child Poverty Commission also showed 29.7% of children in Sunderland and 29.2% of children in Durham City are living in poverty. So, whilst we bask in the ever-moving ant-farm of Sunlun redevelopment, let us not allow the stars haloing around our heads distract from streets wherein residents “live in fear” due to antisocial behaviour, or from the “crisis” hit households struggling to make it from one payday to the next.

And so, the Northern Dream sparkles in the boulevards of new developments and glossy creative opportunities. And while tempting Hollywood-isms scratch at the surface of Sunderland, I think many would agree that overall, the calls of California don’t quite equate to the can’t-help-falling-in-love capabilities of Sunlun’s shiny city streets.

THE END!

You’ll probably know ZELA from TikTok, where she’s racked up millions of views taking the piss with videos like How Brat Sounds to Non-Charli XCX Fans and Olivia Rodrigo If She Was British. But while the internet might know her for the comedy, those in the know have been shouting about her voice for years. This lass can SING.

Fresh off the back of collaborations with Princess Superstar, Bad Babysitter, and Saltburn favourite Perfect, Liv is stepping into a bold new era as ZELA. Now officially independent, she’s doing things entirely on her own terms, and if Popgirl Playlist Song is anything to go by, she’s absolutely made the right call.

A chaotically camp, glitter-soaked anthem, Popgirl Playlist Song was just made for bedroom pre-drinks with the girls before blasting through the speakers of your favourite sweaty gay bar at 1 am. But beneath the shimmering synths and razor-sharp one-liners is some of ZELA’s most honest and vulnerable songwriting yet, proving she’s got just as much to say as she does hooks.

We caught up with ZELA to chat about embracing her independent era, the story behind Popgirl Playlist Song, and why this might just be her most iconic chapter yet.

This feels like a completely new chapter for ZELA. What made now the right time to step into this era?

Z: I just wrote more & more music that gave me that feeling in my stomach (if you’re an artist you know the one), and everything after that just clicked. I’m really proud of my past releases, but this new chapter & the trajectory of the year ahead is the one I’m most excited about. Girlhood, humour, celebration and feminine rage have consistently been the foundations for my art; they just feel more connected now than ever before.

Is there anything about this new era that feels more authentically you than before?

Z: I’ve really enjoyed the evolution of my sound, but pop has always been at the heart of it all. I’ve experimented with subgenres, but now I feel like I’ve really stepped into my own universe. I’m only just getting started with ‘popgirl playlist song’; I’m already yellow PVC boots-deep into this campaign and loving every second, but I’m also simultaneously working on the next 12 months of my music. And I think that’s the beauty of making music authentically; consistently creating what feels good for you & what connects you with your community. Really leaning into all corners of my personalities has been an emotional & creative goldmine. I want to create a world where mischief & chaos can coexist with beauty & joy. And music aside, mentally I’ve never felt more myself - I feel like that can radiate through an artist’s work.

What’s been the biggest challenge, and the biggest freedom, of going independent?

Z: Being an (essentially) one-woman team is a graft. I don’t think people really understand how much work goes into being an independent artist with no silver spoon. Actually being on stage or in the studio is, like, 8% of what you do as an independent artist - you have to be prepared to do ten people’s jobs at once and not lose your fucking mind. But at the same time, that’s what makes this stage so freeing; I get to make 100% of my creative decisions without someone in my ear telling me what to write or what to wear. I know the experience is different for everyone and it’s not always like that, but right now it feels good being able to express myself fully on my own terms and connect with people who get it. There are real benefits to having a small team you can really rely on, especially when things get tough (and they do), rather than a massive machine that doesn’t give a fuck about you beyond making them money. There can be sweet-spots for sure, it’s not one size fits all - but right now this feels like a good place for me while I continue to grow.

If this track is setting the tone for what’s to come, what can listeners expect from this chapter of ZELA?

Z: More ridiculous wordplay, more vulnerability, more romance & cinematics - without saying too much. I’ve been working with new people, and sonically as well as visually, my next campaigns are my most exciting yet. I’ve been having SO much fun with it. I’m also not afraid to let my day-one musical influences shine through now more than ever. One of my producers called me while I was on a beach in Spain and we ended up having this long conversation about stripping everything back to the music I truly love listening to - and love writing. In the months that followed, I really reconnected with my inner child, and it allowed me to open up my sound in a way I don’t think I ever fully had before. It still feels undeniably ZELA, but it finally feels like the version I’ve been building up to all along. I’m proper excited to share it with everyone over the rest of the year.

What’s one misconception people have about making music outside London?

Z: People talk about musicians moving to London like it’s a cheat code; it’s not. It might open certain doors a little quicker, but it won’t write the songs for you. And you’ll just have to pay even more rent. There are unbelievably talented people all over the UK, especially in the North. I’m fiercely proud of being from the North East; we have so much creativity & amazing raw talent here, even though sometimes it does feel like you have to shout a little louder to be heard. Don’t get me wrong, London is an amazing hub, but great art isn’t postcode-dependent. It’s about consistency, finding your people, and being ready when the right opportunity comes along.

You’re another brilliant artist to come out of the North East. How has growing up here shaped you creatively?

Z: Thank you! I wouldn’t change my Northern roots for the world. I cut my teeth gigging in bands with my brother from the age of thirteen in the Working Men’s Clubs, and that shaped me massively in a lot of ways. We would cover loads of 70’s and 80’s pop and rock music; we may as well have been a Blondie tribute band, to be honest. My dad was a musician in the clubs too, and we grew up in a house full of music. When we were thirteen & fourteen, our Christmas present that year was a PA system; we were out gigging by January. It was some of the best years of my life, and some of the worst. Proper graft. I feel like that experience toughened me up for a career as a musician for sure. That’s around when I started writing my own lyrics too, I’d write about my experiences in the clubs and quickly found this self-aware, satirical crossover that allowed me to find humour in the complexities of things, and the rawness really made for good storytelling as well as being cathartic for me. Overall, I had an absolute blast. I learnt a lot about my voice, what it takes to be a good performer, I also learnt early on that men can be fucking atrocious. Most importantly, I had a bit of money for the chippie if it was a cash pick-up that night.

Outside of music, I think the experience of just growing up in a working-class North East town makes it even more of a mind-blow when a fucking Spice Girl follows your Insta.

If you could manifest one thing for ZELA over the next year, what would it be?

Z: I have to be careful with how I answer this because my manifestation skills are insane. I don’t care what you do or don’t believe in; I don’t even know myself, but somehow most of the ridiculous things I think about hard enough end up happening - or a version of them does. I nearly evaporated when Lily Allen followed me. Or when Charli XCX commented on my video!! I know I’m name-dropping, but I’ve earned it. Not to sound like an absolute boomer, but despite the downsides to social media being what it is today, it’s mental where your art can take you within that. Let’s manifest that I make it to the BRITs, even if I’m just holding JADE’s bag or Doja’s vape until I get my own award.

We always ask this... what do you think is radge?

Z: Hypnotists. (teach me)

Popgirl Playlist Song is out NOW! Listen here:

As a society, we can accept ‘stereotypical gays’, those who are often reduced to a specific role by media or internet memes; these ordinarily are gay men who love shopping and gossiping, or the bisexual girls who wear eyeliner, have a fringe, and are an indie man’s manic pixie dream girl. But send in a butch with hairy pits, facial piercings, and a workwear fit, and people just can’t hack it. Many people feel that just because they don’t want to diva down in a sequin gown that they are overlooked (oftentimes by white cis gay men in their own communities) as if queer masculinity in and of itself is somehow not radical and progressive, it is. We’ve become so focused on dismantling toxic masculinity that we’ve forgotten queer masculinity actually has a lot of power.

So this is a love letter to all the butches, mascs, studs, and transmasculine people out there.

These opinions don’t stop onlookers on the street either, it follows people straight into their homes and relationships. Now, an acceptance of masculinity does not mean you identify as a man. I’ve heard people say, ‘well if you’re the ‘man’ in the relationship and you dress like one too, why don’t you just transition?’ or women who date butch women being told, ‘Why not just date a man instead, because you basically already are?’ I’ve dated women who have confided in me that past flings have treated them like boyfriends while exploring their sexualities because their proximity to masculinity felt safer and more familiar. We’re all about acceptance in the community until the masc wants to pull up to pride in an Adidas trackie and the stud wants to wear a durag and sag their pants. Genuinely think to yourself about the last time you’ve seen masculine women or trans men celebrated anywhere, rather than being shunned for their performance of gender.

My first ever pride was in 2019 when I was 15 years old, back in the city I was born in, good old sunny Dundee. I was freshly out, young, naive, and had little to no idea of how intense the pressures and politics behind the parade were. I felt no need to go all out; in fact, it was quite a casual thing at the time, just a walk over the Tay Bridge with my mates to sit shyly with our flags in Slessor Gardens, just taking it all in. I’m somewhat ashamed to say that I’ve barely ventured to many prides since, unless I stumble across them in passing. The complex relationship with flip-flopping between labels of my sexuality might be the reason in part, but also, it’s all just seemed quite intense lately. Tensions are high in politics, and the infighting within the community and the left as a whole is at an all-time high. The thought of putting my all into a flamboyant outfit and going out of my way to prove my love for women just seemed like a bit much. Plus, unlike in previous years, my heart has now been taken by a fella, and nobody wants to be the bisexual girl at Pride with her boyfriend. I mean, the way the internet goes on, you’d think it was a hate crime, but that’s a whole different conversation to be had. But all that aside, I know what it feels like to be side-eyed for not performing my queerness “correctly,” even if my reasoning is different.

Mascs get hate for the opposite thing, not for underperforming their queerness, but for underperforming femininity. The term butch originated in the US in the 1940s as a way to describe masculine lesbians. These Butch women often found themselves working jobs such as factory workers or taxi drivers, as they did not uphold strict gender-conforming dress codes for women. They were often seen as protectors of gay bars during the raids in the 1950s, and although, of course, everyone fought back, they definitely held the primary role of defending against attacks. Not only this, but it was only the lesbians who took care of the gay men in their communities during the AIDS crisis, earning them the L at the beginning of LGBTQ+.

That’s not even the only time queer masculinity had an extremely distinct and impactful culture of its own. Gay Leathermen are the perfect example of this. It traces back to a lot of men who had come home from the war and didn’t feel they fit the effeminate stereotype expected of them, so they decided to lean into something that felt harder instead. They took a lot of inspiration from military and biker culture, and managed to shape a visual identity for decades to come. Lesbians weren’t far behind either; the first lesbian BDSM organisation and Dykes on Bikes both landed around 1979. Butch women and lesbians were a big part of building that world. They’d always been in the background, carving out space for themselves in a very gay male-dominated space, but eventually they started getting their own clubs off the ground. However, these leather bars, clubs, and bathhouses got hit by police raids way more aggressively than other gay venues through the 70s and into the 80s, and after the AIDS crisis came along, the entire community got scapegoated as responsible for spreading it, which wiped out most of the culture’s visibility for a long while.

Yet despite all this, they are primarily overlooked by general society. Of course, the queer community loves and appreciates them, but that’s about all the recognition they get, and even mainstream media has done its bit to keep them that way: butch women barely appear onscreen in positive roles at all, and when they do turn up, they’re routinely written as predatory or unhinged rather than just, you know, a woman who follows butch values. Even The L Word, the biggest lesbian show ever made, managed to have basically one ‘butch’ character across its entire run (and I say butch lightly because even Shane is a pretty, skinny white woman), everyone else was femme enough to stay palatable to a straight audience.

When it comes to studs, though, they had it even harder, only to get even less. The only vaguely mainstream representation they’ve ever had comes from Orange Is the New Black, which must be a bit of a kick in the face when white lesbians have had Ellen and The L Word, and your rep comes from literal criminals in prison. Even the rare times butchness does get put front and centre onscreen, research has shown it’s disproportionately handed to Black actresses playing “tough” or “hard” characters, which doesn’t actually give Black women the representation they deserve; it just quietly reinforces the idea that Black women are less feminine to begin with. And it’s not like Black queer culture hasn’t given the rest of us everything either: Black gay people invented gay culture, full stop. Everything always leads back to ballroom, and you would not catch your cis straight white friends saying “clock it,” “slay,” or “gagged” without it. Yet the language gets borrowed a lot more readily than the people wearing it get respected. The term “stud” itself came about from racial-sexual stereotypes dating back to slavery, when Black women were placed into labour alongside men and tasked with “masculine” presenting roles, which only furthered their inability to access their own gender and sexuality on their own terms.

And why is presenting masculine more threatening on some bodies than others? Straight people would have died for Ellen DeGeneres back in the day, but show them 070 Shake, and they’d probably have a heart attack. Hannah Gadsby put it plainly in her comedy special Nanette, describing the homophobic attack she survived because she was, in her attacker’s own logic, “incorrectly female... and that is a punishable offence.” This is the harsh reality for masculine-presenting women now, especially with laws in the US meaning people now need to prove their gender, thanks to all the anti trans rhetoric that the right has been peddling. There are dozens of examples of this, such as a queer cisgender teenage girl from Minnesota who has filed a gender discrimination case against a Buffalo Wild Wings location after a server reportedly followed her into the bathroom and made her prove she is not transgender.

It’s not just a queer thing, either, or even just a race thing. Straight society has its own version of this going on with class. Owen Jones wrote a whole book on how Britain went from treating the working class as “salt of the earth” to “scum of the earth,” with the chav stereotype used as a handy way for politicians and media to dodge actual engagement with inequality by blaming individuals instead of the system. Academics studying the stereotype have gone further, arguing the “chav” is a racialised and gendered figure, a kind of “failed whiteness” set up in opposition to respectable, middle-class norms. So a masculine person in a tracksuit isn’t just read as “too masculine,” they’re read as too common as well. Clean-girl Kristen Stewart type androgyny tends to get a pass within the community and in media, however, when it comes to people like Libby Mae (controversies aside) wearing sportswear and being working class doesn’t. And I see working-class lesbians rocking a matching tracksuit and a bun about Sunderland town every single day, but not the tiniest smidgen of representation for them anywhere whatsoever. That’s not even about queerness at all, really; that’s just Britain being Britain, and it piles straight on top of everything else.

And speaking of how we love to steal queer AAVE (honestly just AAVE in general), we also now have a complete epidemic of straight men dressing like lesbians, carabiners, and all. Performative fashion boys are gaining social capital by dressing like lesbians and exaggerating their progressiveness, generally trying to give off an ethical type of masculinity. This uniform gets thrown on by men chasing a certain kind of progressive, well-read, left-leaning woman, and somehow it reads as charming rather than confrontational.

Jorts, cargos, and cropped hair were once a rejection of hyper-femme expectations that could genuinely get you hurt; now it’s just a fit a man wears to signal he’s “one of the good ones.” He’s got the tote bag, the feminist paperback, the matcha, the carabiner jingling at his hip, and nobody clocks the queer context. There are literal contests for this now, “performative male” competitions popping up on campuses where men compete to out-soft each other for a laughing crowd of women, and don’t queer people have already run with the joke, starting their own “performative masc lesbian” pageants right back at them. But the part that actually stings underneath the bit is that butches wore variations of this uniform for decades and got called predatory, unlovable, or worse for it. These women understood exactly what they were risking by looking like that in public, yet man wears it for six months and gets called an ally. He’ll feel perfectly safe stopping in an alleyway to hand roll his cigarettes with wired earphones in and never have the fear of getting jumped for his outfit on the way home.

It’s just typical how a man can borrow the whole look and get showered with praise, while the women who actually built it still can’t get cast as anything but a punchline.

I am delighted that in the year of 2026 we finally have a lot more media representation, especially for queer women, with cult classics like Bottoms and stars like Chappell Roan, Doechii, and Renee Rapp rising to fame at top speed. Growing up, queer women in the mainstream basically meant Ellen or nothing, so watching people like Billie Eilish, Lily Rose Depp, Olivia Ponton, Cardi B, Amandla Stenberg, Julien Baker, and Megan Thee Stallion show a whole new generation that liking girls is nothing crazy or new. But again, I’m sure you can see from that list there are next to no butch or masculine women on the scene. There may be more if you’re deep in the community and know the niche mascs out there, but to the rest of us, representation in pop culture is severely lacking. In the academic paper ‘Where are the On-screen Butch Lesbians?: Navigating Constructive Lesbian Representations in Mass Media, ’ representation research keeps finding the same thing decade after decade: audiences say they want butch women onscreen, and the industry keeps handing them thin, femme ones instead.

This is exactly why nobody needs Hollywood’s permission to exist like this in the first place. You don’t need to reject masculinity to be accepted in your queerness, and more importantly, you don’t need to have any proximity to cis men at all to accept that. Part of the beauty of the lesbian community, especially, is its ability to decentre men entirely: beauty standards set up by the patriarchy are entirely meaningless to them because they quite frankly couldn’t care less how men perceive them.

We spoke to Pulse Newcastle, who host club nights for lesbians and trans people, and they stated:

“I think people feel like feminine men (in the queer community) are more palatable because femininity is often perceived as being weak and less threatening. When a masculine woman shows up in that role, it’s intimidating because it challenges their own perceptions of gender roles.”

And it’s not only heterosexual people doing the judging. Even within gay male spaces, lesbians and trans mascs who don’t perform an “acceptable” femininity can come up against outright hostility. Researchers have pointed out that homosociality among gay men can end up reinforcing the same misogyny it should, in theory, have no time for. It’s also worth saying that even within masc identities themselves, things aren’t always straightforward; there’s been genuine tension in the past between butch women and trans men, two groups who’ve historically shared a lot of the same space and the same scrutiny, but related to their own masculinity differently. Masculinity in this community was never one neat, single thing. Treating it like it is, is part of the problem.

This fear of masculinity in women doesn’t just come from queer spaces either. It’s somewhat reminiscent of how men acted when ladette culture was booming in the UK, and people simply couldn’t handle it. Think Sarah Cox, Zoe Ball, Billie Piper necking pints and swearing on telly, loud women, laddish, drank the same and dressed the part, and got absolutely eviscerated for it in the press for being “unfeminine” or “setting a bad example,” while their male mates doing the exact same thing were just having a laugh. Straight society has never really been comfortable with women taking up masculine space, queer or not. It’s just that when it’s a straight woman, it gets called “ladette culture” and mocked in a tabloid, and when it’s a queer woman, it gets policed from inside her own community too, which honestly feels like getting it from both ends.

Being punished for showing up masculine is one outcome. The other, and the one nobody talks about, is just being erased from the conversation altogether, which brings me to the group everybody loves to forget, trans men. LGBTQ Nation ran a piece on this exact topic last year. Trans women obviously get hugely demonised for giving up manhood because the idea of doing that is treated as unthinkable in a world built on male supremacy; it’s like they’re walking away from something everyone’s meant to want. Trans men, however, get the opposite treatment; they are dismissed completely. This is because becoming a man is seen as something expected, maybe even a bit envied (or even pushed upon for many masculine people), so it barely registers as a threat at all. Lee Hurley, a trans man writing for Huck, put it plainly: ‘society finds it easier to understand wanting to become a man than the reverse, which is exactly why trans women end up front and centre of every headline while trans men barely get a mention.’ He’s aware and honest about the flip side of it all, that same invisibility handed him real, tangible male privilege the second he transitioned, not worrying about walking home at night and being taken seriously the second he opened his mouth, while trans women lose every bit of that safety the moment they’re visible. An ACLU attorney interviewed for the LGBTQ Nation piece put this into perspective: trans men expose “the artifice behind this idea of male supremacy,” basically proving there was never anything built into manhood that made it supreme to begin with. Which is really what I think makes people so uncomfortable.

Charlie Supastar, a trans man and fashion designer from Liverpool working in trans-menswear, put it perfectly:

“While it’s a great thing, I think the celebration of femininity in queer people has actually made people start to shy away from masculinity. As if queer masculinity in and of itself is somehow not radical and progressive, it is. I think we’ve become so focused on dismantling toxic masculinity that we’ve forgotten queer masculinity actually has a lot of power.” Charlie points to trans representation as proof of the gap: in researching trans visibility in fashion, they found small percentages of trans women on catwalks and in magazines. Trans men, meanwhile, barely got a mention. “I can only assume the answer is 0.”

Sometimes masculinity gets punished, sometimes it just gets erased. But it was never actually about masculinity itself. It’s the idea of what it threatens to give away, the idea that gender really is just a performance. On a butch woman, it exposes the fact that men don’t actually own toughness, authority, or swagger; they just got there first and pulled the ladder up. On a trans man, it proves manhood was never some sacred biological thing to begin with, it’s a status anyone who feels it strongly enough can walk into. Every time masculinity turns up somewhere it’s not supposed to, it stops looking like a birthright and starts looking like what it is, a costume, created by community, emotion, socialisation, trends, something anyone can try on. That’s the bit that actually scares people. The possibility that maybe none of it was ever theirs to guard in the first place.

Here’s the bit I actually owe you, because this was meant to be a love letter, and I got a bit carried away proving my point as per. To every butch, masc, stud, and transmasculine person reading this, you are not a watered-down version of queer, you are not a “before” picture, and you do not owe anyone a single thing to prove you belong at a parade. You built the bars we still drink in, you held the line when it actually mattered, and you were caring for a dying community before anyone else could bear to touch it. You’ve been quietly, stubbornly showing up ever since, no matter what we’ve decided is or isn’t palatable this year. You have stood your ground unchanging and unwavering through decades of misrepresentation, hate, and ignorance. You’ve stood in the face of adversity and fought for representation and have shared your rich history long before it became trendy. Pride was never just a dress code, a super femme or hypersexual stereotype, or a rainbow-washed tool for capitalism; it was a protest, a fight, a war even, and you were on the frontline of it long before it ever got a parade route. So this Pride, show up in your own radge way, however the hell you want to, and however that looks on you. You don’t need anyone’s permission, least of all mine, and you never did.

No. It’s the self-proclaimed “auditors” and “journalists” stalking the city centre Meta Glasses on, unconsenually filming anyone who will give them their 15 minutes of TikTok fame.

I must admit that this has been bothering me for a while. We’ve deliberately put off covering it in RADGE Magazine because the last thing we wanted was to give these so-called content creators (if you can even call them that) more attention. They seem to thrive on ragebait, shamelessly using it to grow their platforms. However, it’s become impossible to ignore. This isn’t a passing trend; it’s metastasising. Every week, another TikTok account appears, armed with the same formula and a pair of Meta Glasses.

There are even videos where you can watch it happen in real time: one creator starts filming while the others quickly gather around like a pack of vultures, circling anyone they think might give them the confrontation or humiliation they’re chasing. More often than not, the people on the receiving end are vulnerable individuals who never meaningfully consented to becoming content in the first place.

Whenever anyone criticises this genre of content, the creators and their supporters tend to recycle the same handful of arguments. Let’s address them now so we’re not wasting each other’s time.

“It’s not illegal to film someone in a public place.”

Aye, it usually isn’t. But legality isn’t the same thing as morality.

Whether something is legal depends on the circumstances, and filming in public can become unlawful in certain situations involving harassment, privacy, data protection, or other forms of misuse. More importantly, we’re talking about people deliberately seeking out vulnerable strangers, provoking confrontations, and uploading those moments to platforms where they generate hundreds of thousands of views, and, in many cases, advertising revenue.

You can’t seriously argue there’s nothing exploitative about chasing someone who appears to have learning difficulties down the street while shouting at them, all because you know it’ll perform well on TikTok.

“But they give to homeless people.”

Nice one. I’m genuinely glad if someone receives food, shoes, or money they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

But doing charity doesn’t grant immunity from criticism. A broken clock is right twice a day.

If I filmed someone at one of the lowest points in their life without their meaningful consent, uploaded it to millions of people, and profited from the engagement, handing them a meal beforehand wouldn’t suddenly make the rest of it ethical.

“They’re just showing the true state of Newcastle. Maybe the council should do something about the drug addicts.”:

Newcastle does have a homelessness and addiction crisis. Anyone who spends five minutes in the city centre can see that. What’s far less discussed is how that crisis has become a source of online entertainment.

The people featured in these videos aren’t statistics; they’re real people, many of whom are visibly under the influence, living with mental illness, or experiencing homelessness. Their vulnerability is what makes them attractive to these creators because vulnerability generates clicks.

And if the people making and sharing this content were genuinely motivated by compassion, they’d be just as concerned with the comment sections as they are with the view count. Instead, they’re often filled with ridicule, dehumanising jokes and abuse, left to rack up engagement unchecked.

So, let’s stop disguising prejudice as concern. If your first instinct when seeing someone in crisis is to reach for a camera instead of offering dignity and respect, you’re not documenting a social issue; you’re exploiting one.

“But they’re journalists. It’s their job!”

Calling yourself a journalist doesn’t automatically make you one.

This argument is actually quite offensive to the countless journalists who have spent years training, learning media law and ethics, and building careers based on accuracy, accountability, and the public interest. Journalism isn’t sticking on a pair of Meta Glasses, provoking strangers, and uploading the aftermath for likes.

By now, I hope it’s obvious that this isn’t a debate about whether filming in public should be legal. It’s about whether exploiting vulnerable people for engagement should be socially acceptable.

But most importantly, it seems we’re far from alone in feeling this way.

Over the past week, a petition has gained momentum on social media, garnering significant public support and media attention. At the time of writing, more than 5,075 people have signed it, calling for stronger enforcement of harassment laws, asking authorities to consider issuing a Community Protection Notice (CPN) against certain content creators, urging Newcastle City Council to publish clearer guidance on filming vulnerable people, and demanding better support for those who become the targets of these videos.

Whether you agree with every demand or not, one thing is clear: a growing number of North East residents are questioning whether exploiting vulnerable people for clicks should simply be accepted as entertainment.

Christine Grey, who started the petition, spoke to RADGE Magazine and said:

“Now more than ever, when I’m on my social media accounts, I’m seeing a massive influx in these so-called ‘content creators’ in Newcastle Upon Tyne (and in other major UK cities) harassing, degrading, insulting, and intimidating vulnerable people. These ‘influencers’ are using covert filming methods: glasses with hidden cameras, taped over recording lights, and wearable devices designed to look like ordinary sunglasses. The intention is simple and sinister: to film people without their knowledge, then monetise their distress.

The irony is hard to ignore. These creators want to stay anonymous themselves. They hide behind balaclavas, masks, and carefully curated online personas. They refuse to show their faces, yet feel entitled to broadcast the faces of vulnerable people to thousands of viewers.

So who are these vulnerable people? Many assume it refers only to people who are homeless, but that’s not the case at all. Vulnerability, by definition, includes anyone unable to protect themselves from harm, bullying, or exploitation. And the targets reflect that. Members of the LGBTQ+ community have been singled out. Individuals with disabilities have been mocked or baited. People who appear intoxicated, confused, or lacking capacity have been filmed without any understanding of what’s happening to them.”

At the heart of this debate, it’s not about who can and can’t film in public; it’s about what kind of community we want to be and nurture.

I’ve always thought of Newcastle, and the North East more broadly, as one of the friendliest places in the country. We’re known for looking out for our neighbours, for working-class solidarity, for helping people when they’re down, and respecting those who are different. We love the radgies who make this region what it is. They’re part of the character of the place, not an extra in someones viral video.

What we’re seeing here isn’t documenting Newcastle, it’s exploiting some of its most vulnerable residents for entertainment. And that’s a line we shouldn’t be comfortable crossing.

Haway, Newcastle. We’re better than this!

If you’d like to support the campaign, you can sign the petition here:

https://www.change.org/p/protect-vulnerable-people-in-newcastle-from-exploitative-non-consensual-filming

Let’s start with the exciting news that you have recently signed with EMI North. Can you remember how you felt when you knew the offer was coming in?

Jocelyn - I was very emotional. I was waiting in the pub whilst my partner was getting their hair cut before we all met up for our photographer’s and Finley’s birthday party, and I remember not knowing when to say anything, and I was just talking about hair for ages because I was panicking.

Jack - I was on a bus to the same birthday party, and I was stepping off the bus as our manager called, and he said, “Mate, are you sitting down? You have got a deal with EMI North, and all I could say was “Fuck off”

I was so beside myself, but I didn’t want to steal the thunder from Rosie’s birthday.

Jocelyn - Finley was extra happy because it was his birthday and his signing party.

How important was it that you signed to a northern label?

Jocelyn - We feel very passionate about the north and Scotland. I think we have all had the temptation to move down south or had people in our ear to move down there because there are more opportunities, but we didn’t feel like that was right for us.

Jack - We believe in the bands that are up there. There is so much amazing talent up there. It is a good feeling to still be a part of the movement, but doing it in our own way and sticking to our guns by staying in Scotland.

What about EMI North specifically ran true to the message you want to put out as a band?

Jack - We want to be a booster for everyone up in the north, and that’s what EMI North wants to do, too.

Jocelyn - They have a great local approach, which we love, and they also have the same ambition as us. We want to be a big band and play in big rooms, and EMI North is the perfect balance as it has that major backing but also has the local and caring approach.

Jack - They had a sense for how much we cared about this project and picked us up for the same reasons; it didn’t matter about the Spotify numbers or whatever. They are willing to let us stick to our guns, too, like there is no pressure for us not to work with our people in Glasgow, there is no pressure to go and work elsewhere, so it is very harmonious.

Do you think there is a growing desire from music listeners for bands that come from outside the South?

Both - Yes, definitely.

Jocelyn - Ireland is the moment right now, and that has been inspiring to us and Scottish artists. Maybe it is a hope, but there is a feeling for Scottish artists that ‘it could be us next’. Maybe that is because all the eyes are on us from the World Cup, but they might see there is more going on than just football up here.

You have recently released your first track, ‘Coup de foudre’, under the label. Did the creative process change in any way, having backing from EMI North?

Jocelyn - We had the budget to be able to suit our needs. We had decided with our producer, Ellie Mason, that we should record as much for this one together, but we had to have a studio that could fit the band in, as each amp had to have its own room, so that was a massive difference for us.

It meant we didn’t have to bend the idea or the concept of how we would record the album on a budget; we could just do it. It is a very affordable studio, it’s called Salvation Studios and is quite new, but they have had some big artists in there.

Just like North Easterners, I believe the Scottish have a strong sense of their culture. Do you try to portray that on stage?

Jocelyn - I think there are some things musically, such as being more melodic.

Jack - There is a rich heritage of Scottish pop music that has been influential for years and years. I think we carry the torch for bands such as The Blue Nile and Orange Juice, who have been influential to us for as long as we have been a band.

I think sticking to our guns rather than anything overtly ‘Scottish’. I think it is more about a shared personality, a common respect, and a confidence that perhaps we aren’t encouraged to show much. We are confident people, but we are not really conditioned to boast. I think we are tooting our own horn a little bit, and that is nothing to be afraid of.

You are described as an art-pop glam-rock band. What does that description mean to you?

Jocelyn - Well, that is a little outdated now with the new stuff coming out. There were some of those influences on earlier stuff, but when thinking of the next record, we were asked, ‘Do any of you actually listen to those genres?’ and we had to admit we don’t!

Once we started writing music that was based on our core tastes, it was very easy. Some of that is shoegaze and 90s alt rock.

Jack - Some of our taste links with that, but it is not what I go to put on; I like guitar bands.

Jocelyn - new bands like Feeble Little Horse who are experimenting with intentent-y, pucky, synth-y sounds.

Jack - bands like Sorry, too, where there is sampling, digital moments, a guitar alt edge at the core of it.

In terms of discovering yourself, do you find that a process of discovery or a process of invention?

Jack - Oh, I guess it is both because we are trying to invent, we are trying to do something that hasn’t been done, but I guess it’s like discovering how to make that and combine it as a group.

We have had lineup changes over the years, but now, as the five of us, it has solidified us, and we are settled, and that’s what it feels like with this album. It has been a journey of discovery and invention just letting everyone unlock their skills and find their confidence.

What is the most misunderstood thing about Walt Disco, apart from the sound?

Jocelyn - Being a trans butch lesbian is hard for the world to understand. I am a girl, but I don’t dress much like a girl, and we are not an 80s band, we are not new romantic, and even if we wore make-up, that doesn’t make you new romantic. So there is alot of things that bring expectations, but I guess that some of that is based on what we put out.

It is just asking people to listen to what we are saying in our music and our words in interviews. We are young people, we’ve discovered ourselves a lot in the music, and just asking people to be accepting of that.

You discuss some pretty pressing subjects in your music. Do you think being so open has allowed a stronger bond with your fans?

Jocelyn - Yeah, there are definitely fans who have opened up about their own journey because I have been so outward with mine. I have been vague in the past, through self-protection, but I do want to keep speaking about it.

Has that been heavy for you at times, having fans share their stories?

Jocelyn - It can be, especially if the person is just curious but maybe not well informed, because the questions can be clunky, and if it is at the end of the show, where I am vulnerable, that can be heavy for me, but it is not very common.

It is sweet when people want to talk to me about their lives. I will always listen, and sometimes I have advice.

We are here at Three Tanners Bank on the opening night of your Too Tight tour. How does it feel to be opening up the tour in the North East?

Jack - It feels class. We are on this campaign of bringing some awareness to the North and trying to represent the North in some way, so kicking it off in North Shields, where we have never played before, feels good to get into some uncharted territory.

This is not your first time in the North East, so what about the area makes you want to return time and time again?

Jack - The people, for sure.

Jocelyn - It’s close to Glasgow as well. There is nowhere else in the UK we can play and go home afterwards.

Jack - I like it in the North East. There is a common ground between Scottish people and the people of the North East. There’s so much crossover and mingling of accents. We both say ‘aye,’ which is nice.

What, if any, artistic risks are safer to do at a hometown than out on tour?

Jack - Saying the C word, I think. Maybe it is alright up here, but elsewhere, it is really not good.

Jocelyn - We say it all the time, too. I don’t think I have ever said it on stage, but maybe I have mumbled it at some point.

I suppose playing a gig in London is a risk for us with having to get up so early and the money, whereas English bands maybe don’t have to think about that as much.

What are you hoping is the most radge thing you see while you are on tour?

Jack - Crowdsurfing

Is there anything else you would like to shout about?

Jack - We have a single called ‘Lies’ coming out on the 21st July!

Jocelyn - Yeah! It is banging, it is euphoric, and I’m excited.

You can presave Lies here, which drops at 5 pm today: https://waltdisco.lnk.to/lies

I get it is a joke, but the GTA characters are animations. Your girlfriend is real. A human being, flesh and blood. Can probably do better than a man drooling over an animation and posting things like “I’ll keep her warm” on Reddit.

They are just pixels on a screen, but does this not make the endless misogynistic comments and the sexual desire and open disrespect towards women even more disturbing? Dietz wrote that children learn to internalise sexual depictions of women in video games, viewing them as weak, victims, and sex objects. This is why appropriately rating video games with sexualised characters is crucial. GTA does this; however, the internet does not. Kids are reading all these comments from older men, so the cycle isn’t really broken because of an age rating.

Now, I would be lying if I said I had never played GTA and made my character go into the strip club, or killed every innocent person on the map, or punched female characters. I have. Sometimes it is integral to the game; a mission in the upcoming GTA reportedly makes it mandatory to use the strip club, but the real issue I am talking about is not the game itself; it’s these microcosms of men bouncing off each other and finding some odd sexual gratification from an animation. It is the endless videos of men saying how excited they are to use the strip club in the game, so they can get virtual dances and have sex with characters (as this is allegedly a new feature), and how they are going to break up with their girlfriends so they can do what they want with the video game. I’d be surprised if half of these men had partners, as anyone with an ounce of self-respect should really consider why their man’s main excitement for such a hyped game is the NPC women in it.

It obviously goes alot deeper than this; so many will defend this online behaviour as harmless or ‘boys being boys’. I will be told I am another woman getting easily offended, but these echo chambers negatively affect men’s mental health too, and massively so. Furthermore, men who view images of sexualised female characters and play video games with sexualised female characters have greater tolerance for sexual harassment and rape myth acceptance (Beck et al., 2012; Dill et al., 2008; Fox et al., 2013).

As a woman, the narrative that men’s mental health isn’t cared about enough is pushed on me constantly, and it is only brought up when I talk about women’s health. I do agree that men need to talk more to others and open up to their mates; however, I don’t see enough about how men need to change their attitudes and views to turn their mental health around.

Where is the accountability? The constant feeding of over-sexualised content in media does negatively affect a man’s mental health and how they show up for others in their lives. Yet all I see is men defending it to the high heavens. It’s almost as if the call is coming from inside the house?! So many men are socialised by their male peers to objectify, dominate, and degrade women. It is reinforced through misogyny online, promiscuity or competition among two men to ‘score’, having a partner as a trophy, and addiction to pornographic materials (Elder, 2010).

Sexual violence in video games, TV/film, and pornography is constantly growing, and it actively contributes to paedophilia, misogyny, and femicide. A lot of these sexual depictions are the basis for male sexual education; they normalise the idea of ‘male conquest’ as if you are all little Christopher Columbuses colonising the human form. It normalises control and dominance from a young age and promotes a false fantasy that women will enjoy anything a man demands (Jensen, 2007). All of this manifests into disillusioned men and disempowered men, which then leads to low self-esteem and deep shame. That includes shame for any reason, not just sexual shame, and all of this negativity comes at a price. The shaming of emotions or normal needs and wants can also result in addiction, aggression, and codependence (Lancer, 2014).

Depersonalising sexual interactions and the objectification of women also absolves men of responsibility for their actions and protects them from the shame of rejection (Carnes, 1992). Yet, men feel shame about their behaviour towards women, whether they announce it or not, which then leads them to question their own worth, self-love, and lovability as human beings (Elder, 2010).

Teaching young boys and men that hypermasculinity or disrespecting women is normal equals domination, emotional abuse, and violence, and the emotional toll on men is never discussed because it is considered ‘weak’. It really does become a never-ending cycle of men engaging in this behaviour, feeling shame for it, not getting the help they need, and then taking it out on women.

This is why online discourse cannot simply be laughed off. It is so easy to dismiss things as memes or tell women to lighten up, but these moments don’t exist in isolation. They are products of years of treating female bodies as entertainment, and it isn’t really an argument against GTA, but about what so many men have been taught to value and how it is truly just as detrimental to male mental health as it is to women. None of the jokes, or the defending of them, actually benefits men; it is simply encouraging them to pour their energy into fantasy rather than connection, and they become trapped in pixelated echo chambers of doom where sexual comments are celebrated more than emotional maturity.

I think it is all more embarrassing than funny that men are posting about falling in love with GTA characters or fake models or how they cannot wait to spend hours in a virtual strip club. So many people have convinced themselves that publicly thirsting over pixels is a substitute for genuine intimacy, and the fact that so many men cheer them on instead of asking why they are behaving this way shows how much of an endless loop it can be.

At the end of the day, these female characters across games are not real. The women reading those comments or listening to their partners or male friends/relatives, and the girls growing up watching men behave like this, are real. If your greatest achievement and excitement about one of the biggest game releases of the decade is the chance to ‘goon’ over pixels and ‘jiggle-physics ’, then you are directly contributing to this wild culture. The problem is not the game, but the culture and the male attitudes surrounding it.

Northern and queer, what more is there to love? The ICONIC and perhaps biggest queer rave in the North returns to the Depot Mayfield for its seventh edition, and the line-up is MEGA - you do not want to miss this.

Proudly putting LGBTQIA+ acts right at the top of the bill (it feels correct), Homobloc is a breath of fresh air in a society that’s intent more than ever on diminishing queer and POC rights.

Headlining this year’s event is Grammy Award-winning pop star Kim Petras, a diva in her own right who has climbed to huge heights with tracks like ‘Need For Speed’, ‘Coconuts’, and ‘XXX’, plus collaborations with the likes of Sam Smith and Charli xcx. Joining Kim is a host of esteemed global artists, including Cobrah, a special b2b set from Chicago’s Honey Dijon and Derrick Carter, all-female DJ collective Girls Don’t Sync, and Manchester’s beloved DJ Paulette.

The line-up just keeps getting bigger and more iconic, with some of the best queer, Northern and POC DJs Homobloc has to offer, including S.A.S.S., the powerhouse quartet of Saoirse, Moxie, Peach and Shanti Celeste, alongside Job Jobse, Palms Trax, Aiden Francis, BASHKKA, Horse Meat Disco, Gina Breeze and Isabella. They're really treating us this year!

Homobloc is about far more than just the music. The festival continues to push the boundaries of queer nightlife with one of the UK’s most ambitious performance programmes, brought to life by its community of performers and collectives, the Homodolls.

Curated by Creative Director Sophie Bee, more than 150 Homodolls will transform every corner of Depot Mayfield through drag, dance, theatre and immersive performance. This year’s highlights include We Were Always Here, a powerful new collaboration from Maisha Kungu Dance (MKD) celebrating FLINTA identities; PU RAUL’S SUPERMODELS from Club Rat Entertainment, featuring Drag Race UK stars Banksie, Awhora, Black Peppa and Marmalade; Shrek 666’s immersive new work Putting the T in Trade; the return of Angel Bella Presents: The Strippers of MCR; and Blackstage Pole, whose unforgettable performance was one of last year’s standout moments.

Together, these performances reaffirm Homobloc’s reputation as a festival where queer creativity extends far beyond the dancefloor.

Homobloc is also celebrating 35 years of the legendary FLESH. Born at The Haçienda, FLESH became one of the most celebrated LGBTQIA+ parties in Europe, normalising and pushing queer culture into the mainstream - a true trailblazer, we have a lot to thank them for. To celebrate, FLESH returns in spectacular style to take over the upstairs of the Star & Garter this September, featuring a lineup of boundary-pushing FLESH residents, including Tim Lennox, Kath McDermott, Guy Williams, DJ Paulette, Mike Hux, plus a special appearance from Adeva. The party at the Star & Garter doesn’t stop there! Downstairs, Manchester dyke party Butch Revival will bring their northern lesbian energy, alongside Islington Mill’s trans-centered community pop club nightlife collective T4T. Other acts to grace the pub include Jamie Bull, Flygirl$, Bruk Out, Dandy, Hello Darling, and Mixfag.

And just when you thought the line-up couldn’t get any bigger, Homobloc has gone and added an entirely new stage.

Making its debut for 2026, Vault is a brand new 1,000-capacity space in the former ticket hall of Depot Mayfield, hosted by Glasgow’s legendary Ponyboy. Part hair salon, part club night and part immersive theatre, Ponyboy has built a global reputation for championing trans and non-binary artists, with Time Out and The FADER naming it one of the world’s best club nights.

The new stage is set to be one of the weekend’s biggest draws, with sets from Lady Shaka, Armana Khan, Meg10, Luca Eck, I. Jordan, and a rare DJ set from Dorian Electra. Eeeek.

Headlining the Archive stage is none other than Cobrah, the Swedish artist behind club anthems BANG, FEMININE ENERGY, and GOOD PUSS, bringing a special hybrid DJ/live set to Manchester. She’ll be joined by independent label Live From Earth, who take over the intimate space with a Berlin-heavy line-up featuring LSDXOXO, DJ Gigola, Perra Imunda, Alcatraz, MCR-T and Miss Bashful.

Rod Connolly from Homobloc spoke on how important an openly queer celebration is during such polarising times:

“We are excited to present our first ever summertime edition of Homobloc, bringing together global queer icons, underground heroes, and the next generation of artists who we trust in pushing queer culture and electronic music forward.

In times like these, the connection felt at large-scale events like Homobloc are absolutely crucial for the community. A sea of 10,000 souls all under one roof, dancing ‘til we are free. It’s so powerful. You leave knowing that we are the many, and the people who demonise us are the few.”

One look at this line-up and it's clear: Homobloc 2026 is going to be propa radge. See ya on the dancefloor.

Pre-sale will be live on Thursday 9th July at 10am

General sale will be live on Friday 10th July at 10am

You can get your tickets here: https://www.homobloc.co.uk/

I notice the video has 300+ comments. Curiously, I scroll, and instead of people sharing the joy, I’m met with: “this is GCSE motivation”, “What in the 35p energy drink is this?”, “Not a cold spoon in the house.” Comment after comment, a vague iteration of the last, all with one thing in common and that’s the fact they’re all absolute classist slop shodily disguised by the thin veil of “humour”.

TikTok loves to act socially aware. Misword something slightly, and people are quick to call it out, usually in that patronising “I fear this isn’t it, bestie” kind of tone. But when it comes to class, that awareness seems to disappear. Even the most mundane of posts get twisted. You could say you like scrambled eggs, and someone would reply, “So you hate fried eggs then.” Everyone’s so quick to jump to conclusions, and when class is involved, it goes from a joke to something a bit nastier.

I guess what I’m trying to say is the same people who would jump on other issues are happy to conveniently take the piss here. And the comment sections aren’t just where classism lives; that’s just the tip of the TikTok iceberg.

Classism isn’t new, obviously. However, it does appear that TikTok, in particular, intensifies this by distorting perceptions of wealth, turning working-class lives into an interactive spectacle, and reinforcing the idea that poverty is a personal failure, unlike any other platform.

Social media in general promotes a narrow, performative version of success. Wealth becomes the benchmark. Perfectly curated feeds of Dubai holidays, bottle service in the club, designer clothes, and penthouses in Soho. Scroll long enough, and these lifestyles start to feel normal, not because they are, but because they’re everywhere.

So how is this any different on TikTok? Surely classism is a platform-wide issue. The answer is yes, no, and maybe-so.

According to Forbes, TikTok is now the preferred search engine for Gen Z. We’re not even actively looking for answers anymore. We’re waiting for the algorithm to decide them for us. And that’s where things shift. Because on TikTok, you’re not just seeing wealth, you’re being fed a constant stream of what “normal” is supposed to look like, whether it reflects reality or not.

Trends on TikTok such as “put a finger down rich edition”, turn wealth into a game, turning class inequality into a checklist. For a user base largely made up of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK and US, people are still figuring things out, and that kind of content sets a completely unrealistic standard. Alongside that, you’ve got influencer brand trips, gifted lifestyles, and constant displays of excess. Merged, it creates this underlying pressure. If you’re not flying out to Turkey for a free hair transplant, buying a Birkin bag, or putting down a deposit on a house, it can start to feel like you’re falling behind.

Let me de-influence you for a second. It is completely normal not to know what you’re doing in your 20s. It’s normal not to be able to afford a house, or a brand new car, or any of the things Social media treats as basic milestones. What isn’t normal is a 50-step skincare routine funded by PR packages and a #gifted trip to Dubai every other month.

So when a platform is so heavily saturated in extreme wealth, any displays of normal working-class lifestyles, like caravan holidays, look like failure within this framework.

Anyway, I’d take Haven over Dubai any day.

As Ynes, founder of Fairplay UTD, puts it: “Instagram seems to be more community-focused/intentional these days, whereas TikTok still feels like the Wild West. I feel the algorithm plays into this lolcow - almost bully mentality - that a lot of working-class creators seem to fall victim to. Often, I’ll see a video of someone, perhaps in a less-than-glamorous kitchen, dressed in their comfies, dancing to a viral sound, and I’ll wonder why the fuck it’s come up on my fyp. I’ll head to the comments and see ‘what in the universal credit is this’. Working-class creators often are only taken seriously when we can speak the language and translate our experiences to be palatable to influencer culture.”

On TikTok and social media as a whole, wealth isn’t aspirational; it becomes the standard by which all other lives are judged. Which is exactly how a happy family holiday ends up as a punchline.

In 2026, we like to believe we’ve moved past the days of watching shows like The Jeremy Kyle Show or Benefits Street and calling it entertainment. If you ask anyone, they’ll say those programmes were exploitative and built on tired 2000s tabloid stereotypes about working-class life and culture. But if you actually think about it for more than a second (I know our attention spans are fucked from doom scrolling and AI fruits), we haven’t moved on at all. Poverty porn hasn’t disappeared; it’s merely been rebranded and is now interactive.

The only difference is that there’s no longer a production company acting as the middleman. Over on TikTok, audiences don’t just turn on ITV at 9 am and crack on with their day afterwards; they engage with the content in real time. They comment, they share, they send money. Livestreams featuring financially vulnerable people, or people in unstable situations, are treated like they’re some sort of zoo animal in a glass cage, ready to be viewed and gawked at.

The algorithm encourages this behaviour. Content that shows emotional exposure, instability, or “unfiltered” behaviour is pushed further, and we know that for a fact. It gets more views, more comments, and, importantly, more attention. Therefore, creating a vicious cycle that rewards extreme and sometimes even dangerous behaviour. Vulnerability brings attention, attention brings money, and that pressure can push people to go further, escalating their behaviour in the hope of gifts.

Disturbingly, TikTok has managed to monetise classism.

As Ynes from Fairplay UTD puts it, “You see people ‘ironically’ rise to TikTok fame, like Chloe Williams, who aren’t even in on the joke. The platform is absolutely culpable for how that impacts their lives, but I don’t even know what the solution is. I don’t know another platform that rewards constant engagement in such a dystopian way.

The monetisation side of it plays a huge role. It’s the same double standard again. When working-class people do it, it’s seen as tacky. When influencers do it, it’s aspirational. A working-class mum going live to earn coins, or listing something on TikTok Shop, gets labelled ‘council estate core’. But an influencer flogging something they’ll never wear is suddenly chic, just because it’s filmed on a new iPhone during golden hour.

I know which one I trust more.”

Working-class creators are more likely to rely on this kind of visibility as a source of income, while audiences engage from a position of distance behind their screens, often in comfort and never held accountable. What looks like entertainment for one person is very much survival for another. TikTok hasn’t ended poverty porn; instead, it’s made it participatory.

Now it’s time to get sociological. I think a lot of the people behind the classist comments on TikTok don’t actually realise what they’re doing is Thatcherism 2.0. They probably think it’s a laugh; some would argue maybe it’s not that deep. But if you’re actively commenting on slideshows of deprived areas such as Peterlee, Horden, even the Glasgow Gorbals and putting “GCSE Motivation”, you’re not being edgy, you’re reinforcing the myth of meritocracy.

A quick Sociology 101 for those of you who don’t know what the myth of meritocracy is: The myth of meritocracy is the idea that success is based purely on hard work and talent, when in reality capitalism creates inequalities that mean opportunities and social mobility aren’t equally available to everyone.

So when you’re actively commenting on explicitly working-class content, claiming it to be “GCSE motivation”, you’re not only being a dick but also reinforcing the idea that one must be educated to leave their social situation, undermining a wealth of educated working-class individuals who quite simply don’t have the same cultural capital as their upper-class peers.

There is no socially acceptable way to be working class, it appears. You work hard and manage to treat your family to a caravan holiday, and you’re a shit mam, or you work 12-hour days and live in a deprived area, and you’re still GCSE motivation or 35p energy drink coded - whatever that means. The thing is, a 1-minute TikTok video is just a brief snapshot of someone’s life; there is no context behind these videos, yet people feel entitled to judge based on first impressions.

There’s also something eerily voyeuristic about it. Working-class lives become content to consume and judge from a distance, framed as warning or entertainment rather than treated with the same complexity and dignity as everyone else would like to be.

Bethany, aka @velveteen.oysters, as she’s known on TikTok, creates content that focuses on class mobility, navigating money, lifestyle and social expectations without shame and delves deeper into this theory:

“Because content is so short and visual, there’s very little context. People aren’t seeing family support or financial safety nets behind the scenes; they’re just seeing outcomes. That makes it easy for viewers to compare themselves unfairly, and for creators to unintentionally reinforce unrealistic standards. This reinforces shame in working-class people for constantly feeling ‘behind’.

There’s also a culture of quick judgment. People form opinions in seconds, and nuance around class, upbringing and financial reality often gets lost behind a screen.”

What presents itself as motivation is more often than not judgment in disguise. So we can sit here and have our hot takes about whether or not Jezza K was bad, but surely we’re all doing the same? You cannot act morally superior to previous generations when you’re echoing 2000s tabloid narratives just repackaged into 30-second bite-sized chunks and snarky comments.

I could go on for years about this subject and how much it infuriates me. We live in a TikTok generation that prides itself on moral superiority, yet we don’t hold ourselves to account with the same energy we direct towards others.

Bethany believes it’s less about specific groups and more about a wider culture that rewards appearance over transparency. Obviously, TikTok doesn’t create classism, but it absolutely accelerates and reshapes how it manifests. Of course, classism exists in all aspects of life, online and offline, but TikTok in particular does, in Ynes’ words, “feel like the Wild West”. The platform’s self-image of being socially aware juxtaposes with how comfortable people still are expressing class prejudice.

It truly feels as though we live in a world where people will go straight for the jugular of anyone whose life slightly veers away from what social media has decided is normal.

Now, how do we solve this? I wish I had the answer, I really do. Classism comes in many forms, but social media, and TikTok in particular, seems to have created the perfect conditions for it to thrive. Until classism is treated with the same seriousness as other forms of prejudice, it will remain the bias people still feel comfortable laughing at.

Because, since when did a mam treating her kids to a holiday become something to mock rather than something to celebrate?

I believe that when we start challenging these small, everyday pockets of classism, we create space for community to thrive. And when that happens, everyone benefits.

The impact these women had on the world of football and sport as a whole is undeniable; they effectively reshaped how we saw the players and the spectacle of the games themselves. The idea of their presence alone would send the press into an utter frenzy. This was no longer just about the drunken men chanting for their favourite team; there was an air of glamour and gossip that such male-dominated sports hadn’t seen before, which changed the player and how football was perceived forever, while bringing a whole new audience to the beautiful game.

Shirt sales spiked, stadium attendance among women rose, and the Beckhams’ move to LA Galaxy in 2007 didn’t just make headlines in the sports pages; it landed in bloody Vogue. Football had become something you could be a fan of without ever even watching a match. It didn’t matter whether you gave two shits about the offside rule, you were absolutely keeping tabs because hey, it’s something to talk about, and from your hubby to your hairdresser, everyone was invested.

And yet, more than anything, these women were completely underappreciated in their time.

WAGs put their partners on the map as brands, not just players and gave them a commercial longevity you couldn’t get anywhere else. Take a look at Beckham, by the mid 2000s, he wasn’t just a footballer with sponsors, he was a brand with a footballer attached, doing Armani campaigns and aftershave ads. There’s no denying a fair chunk of that crossover happened because Posh was already a celebrity in her own right before he was, and she pulled him into her world and made him a STAR. He went from talented sportsman to Armani model, fashion icon, and one-half of the biggest celebrity couple of the decade. Thus proving the WAG effect in real time.

You must remember that WAG wasn’t just a relationship status; it was a look. It was a kind of 2000s glamour that can never be replicated, although we keep trying to revive it. The added tabloid headlines were almost part of the outfit. It was VERY new money, quite literally, these young couples had never seen wealth like it (aside from the already established pop girls). They wanted to look expensive and loud like all the rich and famous people they grew up watching on telly, and have fun in this new environment. However, they were heavily mocked for this, which may have a part to play in the quiet luxury styling the partners are wearing courtside today.

Before the WAGs, football coverage lived in the sports pages, only really touched by the corporate boys commuting on the metro or your dad with his morning coffee. After the WAGs, it was in Closer, Heat, OK!, and every gossip column in between. They didn’t just bring a new audience to football; they dragged football into an entirely new media landscape. The transfer window became celebrity news, marriages and breakups were front page, and two worlds collided. A footballer’s personal life was now as commercially viable as his goal tally, and it’s remained this way ever since.

Nowadays, we repost nostalgic TikToks stating we’re “losing the ancient texts” over pictures of Posh and Cheryl sitting pitch-side. We have Abbey Clancy working with Juicy Couture and declaring the World Cup as the “new fashion week”. You can’t forget the hype around peoples modern day WAG Tolami Benson (girlfriend of Bukayo Saka).

However, back in the day, the WAGs were the women that Britain loved to hate. I mean these women were genuinely blamed for England’s 2006 loss of the world cup with Gary Neville later saying: “Elite sports teams should have no distraction. It was a World Cup. We had distractions like you would not believe. It was just a nonsense.” (let it be noted that when the WAGs were banned by notorious WAG hater Fabio Capella from seeing their men more than once a week at the 2010 world cup they were knocked out even earlier).

You may see the term WAG now as somewhat iconic and nostalgic, but in reality, it was extremely reductive and erased everything about these women’s identities down to a single label because they happened to be dating a sportsman. To the press, they were exactly as described: wives and girlfriends, nothing more, nothing less.

At this point in time, celebrity culture was peaking, and these lovely girls simply coming out to support their men, were in for an absolute shock. Imagine you’re dating the football boy in school, and all of a sudden, he’s been signed, and the eyes of the entire country are on you to keep up an image for him, for the team. All whilst suddenly acquiring more money than you’ve ever seen in your life and being papped on your way to the corner shop for a pint of milk. That was the reality for most of these women.

They were (mostly) young working-class girls suddenly exposed to the world of celebrity and expected to know how to deal with it with the dignity and restraint of someone much older who had been in the industry for decades. Coleen Rooney’s man was 16 when he was first signed professionally, and as was she, so it’s really no wonder that they were all acting like kids in a sweet shop the second the spotlight hit them. Sudden fame was thrust upon them, opportunities with brands, magazines, books, the whole shebang, and while one side adored the aspirational rags-to-riches of it all, the media did as it always will and tore them to the ground.

The noughties were absolutely rife with misogyny and barely concealed class snobbery. Jade Goody was hounded by the press her entire career for being too loud, too common and not media trained enough (and yes, the racism scandal was real and wrong, but even before that, the press had already decided who she was and what she was worth). She was simply a working-class woman who dared to be famous without being palatable, and she really reaped the consequences. Kerry Katona was tabloid fodder the second she left Atomic Kitten; her Iceland ads and budget shop associations were used as a punchline by the same papers that would have had nothing to write about if it weren’t for her. And of course, it was no different for our beloved wives and girlfriends.

The press didn’t bother dressing it up either, a Spanish newspaper once wrote, “Not even the stores of Vuitton and Gucci can keep up with the daily attack of the hooligans with Visas”, one Daily Mail journalist stated, “They possess no curiosity about anything other than clothes, champagne and their reflections”.

Because how dare young women bask in their success and spend their money, no matter how they came about it.

And let’s be honest, the outrage was never really about the Visa cards, excessive designer purchases or matching velour tracksuits. A 19-year-old from Croxteth turning up to bigwig events with a Birkin and a sunbed tan was always going to get a different reaction from the ‘well-to-do’ old money wives. It wasn’t classism dressed up as critique, it was just straight up classism, full stop.

Because of the WAGs, coming to a match is now a fashion show in its own right; celebrities are styled for their crowd appearances the same way they’d be styled for a red carpet, except now there’s a nonchalance to it. There’s a pretence that they’ve always had this attention and this wealth, clearly having learned from the consequences being showy had for our diva supremes. And maybe that’s the thing, twenty years on, women around football still aren’t really allowed to look like they’re enjoying the money and the attention.

The OG WAGs just hadn’t learned yet that you’re allowed to have the lavish life, you just have to look like you don’t care.

The clearest example of what being a WAG actually costs these women is Victoria Beckham. While David got to bathe in the glory of their power couple, reaping all the benefits, she was ridiculed more than any of the other women. Yet somehow she came out the other side as a highly regarded and most importantly RESPECTED fashion designer. She had to rebuild everything she was known for, disown the messy pop girl of it all and make being a WAG nothing but a tiny blip in her timeline just to be taken seriously by the press.

Whereas Coleen Rooney never got that fresh start, and because she dared to remain a WAG, her story continues to be dragged through courtrooms and across tabloids to this day. Even when Rooney decided to take a stand for herself, fight back, and, what you would think was most important to the press, win, Wagatha Christie felt more like a punchline than an actual achievement. Says it all really. The message was exceedingly clear; you could be forgiven for being a WAG, but only if you stopped being one.

And nowhere was that loss of control more visible than Baden-Baden 2006: paps were camped outside hotels and full daily outfit breakdowns were hitting the published media at warp speed, only these women had no control of their images, it was like some kind of fucked up Met Gala. They looked, however, the media wanted them to look, no choice in the matter whereas today’s WAGs are posting, editing, and being styled entirely on their own terms.

The paparazzi shot is now a dying art, and honestly, good.

We’ve moved on from the tabloid era, supposedly. But the obsession with women in male-dominated sporting spaces hasn’t gone anywhere; we’re just consuming it differently. This World Cup, I’ve seen a plethora of young men choosing what team to support based on the baddies in the crowd. And now, instead of being papped in the crowd, we AI generate it or take the photos ourselves. Today’s WAGs have carefully negotiated brand deals instead of a Heat magazine double-page spread, I mean, even Kim Kardashian is an F1 WAG now.

The women are still there, still being watched, still changing the game and still not getting nearly enough credit for it. Twenty years on, and we’re doing the exact same thing, just slightly more polite about staring. It’s less of a glaring spotlight in these women’s eyes and more of a cheeky iPhone flash.

Directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner Sonya Tayeh, I should have known that the production would have blown me away. Sinéad O’Connor’s music was never just a song with no meaning; it encapsulated grief, protest, spirituality, fury and compassion. She truly sang as she lived and never softened herself to make her audience, the media or even those in power comfortable. That energy was perfectly conveyed by Sonya Tayeh and the 10 dancers, who, with only church pews as a setting, moved the audience to tears and a standing ovation.

Each dancer seemed to carry a different fragment of the singer. Defiance, tenderness, loneliness, joy, the list goes on. And through movement, rather than imitation, the dancers showed the lifecycle of Sinéad O’Connor’s art perfectly. The makeup of the company was ten women with more than five hundred years of collective wisdom between them. In an entertainment industry and society seemingly obsessed with youth and terrified of ageing, there was something quietly radical about watching women move with this much confidence, power and experience.

As women, everywhere we look, we are told that ageing is something to resist, disguise or reverse. I have seen so many TikToks of teenage girls being shocked at how women look in their late 20s, 30s and onwards because true portrayals are hardly shown in the media. Women, especially, are expected to disappear the moment wrinkles begin to arrive. The Surge offers the opposite argument and proves experience is not something to hide but is something to celebrate.

O’Connor’s own voice, drawn from her music and memoir Rememberings, gave the work its almost spiritual quality and really gave the evening an emotional weight. What really stayed with me afterwards was the honesty of the dancing; everything felt rooted in something real, whether it was pain, joy, freedom, womanhood or ageing. It truly did feel like a meditation on what it meant to live life truthfully and what it costs to refuse conformity.

Overall, I have never been to a show which deserved a long-standing ovation more than this. It was so beautifully done, and I think I will be discussing it with everyone for a while. The Surge was not a shoddy tribute or bad imitation, which I was initially worried about. It was a stunning reminder of what we stand to lose when we stop valuing ourselves, the art around us and our true passions. Sonya Tayeh is already an established name worth stopping for; however, this show was such a raw show of talent that I’d push everyone to see it.

I know it wasn’t. Every tournament before this, I’d be trudging through rain or shine to the nearest pub garden. The only time you’d see me in red and white would be for an international tournament, sometimes with face paint smudged off my cheeks from the inevitable downpour. I’d be peering through the pub window, trying to catch the score; watching over the shoulder of someone on the metro; or carrying crates of drink back to my friend’s house. Excitement, an unspoken nervousness, and quiet false hopes would all be bubbling in the bottom of our stomachs. This time, it just isn’t there. Yet, I had it for the Euros. I had the stomach twists, the goosebumps, and the tears afterwards. Is it because we have all been disappointed at the last hurdle too many times?

I know I don’t have the excitement for one reason. It isn’t tournament fatigue, and I don’t think it is America. Football was always the one place where I felt most English. With no English roots, other than having been born here by chance rather than clear ancestry, football presented a way to really feel patriotic about where I grew up, where I lived and where, truthfully, I love. I always knew the players’ names, the chants, every painful statistic about penalties and every reason why this year would somehow be different. For ninety minutes, I was nothing but English.

That identity and love have come under attack in ways I didn’t really think possible in the 2020s. I thought England was naively past the love of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and was slowly turning a new corner. Slowly but surely. Yet in the blink of an eye, we are further back than I can ever remember being for minorities in the UK. Not just racial minorities, it’s a pretty bleak place for LGBTQ+ people, women, and girls. Our rights and our safety are at risk every day by people who think they are more English than their neighbour.

Football truly was the one place where Englishness felt big enough for everyone. The team always reflected that. You have sons of immigrants, kids from council estates, and players with grandparents from every corner of the world, all pulling on the same shirt and proudly wearing the same flag. In 2018, Gareth Southgate described the male squad as representing “modern England”, and for a while, it genuinely felt like they did. I think that is why I have had trouble fully engrossing myself in this World Cup. Somewhere along the way, the symbols involved with loving the country that raised me have become heavier than they should be.

The St George’s Cross always felt temporary to me, a way to show pride. It came out for a few weeks every few years. You’d see it hanging from car windows, pubs and corner shops before quietly disappearing again. To me, it meant football, it meant anticipation, and it meant collectively convincing ourselves that football was really coming home. This time, I haven’t seen many displays across the pubs, the shops, or the houses, and I know I haven’t rushed to buy an England top or get a group together to watch the match. That same cross that would once spark excitement for a ball being kicked around now makes me wonder what people think I am trying to say when I am wearing it. Do I want to put one up and petrify someone in my area? Do I want a Muslim to cross the road when they see me wearing it? I am not overthinking, as I know the unsettling feeling I have felt for months now every time I have seen the flag waving.

Arguments about immigration, belonging and national identity become increasingly violent. Flags have become political props, and riots have been excused as patriotism. Now we could be labelled terrorists for supporting a Palestinian cause, and there are now more people being charged for attending peaceful marches than there are in jail for Grenfell. The country has become so divided by those in power, and we have all lapped it up so much that suddenly something that once felt joyful feels loaded.

Maybe that is why I haven’t seen the same excitement this year or felt the same atmosphere that often comes with international tournaments. It is an empty feeling for a country usually so connected by a love of football. I haven’t seen excitement, but I have seen people petrified to leave their kids in their homes in case the Belfast riots jump over the water. The sense that the entire country has silently agreed to suspend reality for a month and obsess over football instead has gone.

I don’t think I love England any less, but because I have spent the last few years watching people try to narrow what England is allowed to look like, I have felt the love increasingly hard to match with my own identity. The version of England I fell in love with through football was never super narrow, and it is impossible to fit into a single flag, slogan or political movement. Football reminds us that we have far more in common than the people in power would like us to believe. And for ninety minutes, nobody cares where your parents were born, what religion you follow or who you love because it literally doesn’t fucking matter as long as you aren’t harming someone.

That is why this World Cup feels different, but maybe that is also why it matters. A lot of us, especially those who are not fully English but want to be proud of living here, can find a great sense of belonging in a football crowd. A huge sense of belonging is in believing it might come home, and it gives us a chance to love our country again for ninety minutes. For all the division, anger and fear that seems to dominate the country right now, football still gives us rare moments where we can recognise ourselves in one another. As someone whose family and friends come from somewhere else but who have always called England home, that feeling is worth holding onto, and I am trying to find ways to hold onto it that don’t include what the flag has become.

What was once a fun way to find your niche or like-minded people has now become a part of the cyclical hell now known as the micro trend. These ‘aesthetics’ used to be lasting and instantly recognisable like the more foundational subcultures that came before them, but nowadays we’re really just saying shit. What do you mean you can just order a whole pre-curated style package because a TikTok slideshow told you that you’re like soooo #y2k?

Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.

Punk was a response to Thatcherite Britain. Rave culture was a reaction to the Criminal Justice Act. Goth emerged from post-industrial bleakness. These subcultures had music, politics, community; you didn’t buy into them, you lived them. So what on gods green earth is Tomato Girl reacting to? A slow summer and a Pinterest board? What does coquette stand for politically? What is the Guinness moustache 2 dot swap boy rebelling against? Nothing.

We’ve kept the aesthetic shell of subculture and hollowed out everything that made it mean something.

And look, let’s not get too nostalgic about it, we’re not sat here pretending there was ever some golden age where fashion was pure and untouched by money. Malcolm McLaren was selling punk from a shop on King’s Road before half those kids even knew what they were rebelling against. Subculture and commerce have always been in bed together; obviously, that’s not new. The difference is the speed; people used to spend years, genuinely YEARS, developing a look.

Trying things, abandoning them, finding a silhouette that felt like theirs, wearing something until it fell apart. Now you get three weeks before the algorithm decides it’s over, and you’re already behind. It’s not that fashion got commercialised, it’s that the commercialisation got so fast and so all-consuming that there’s no breathing room left to develop an actual point of view before someone’s already packaged it, sold it and moved on.

Now, back to my previous list of micro niche TikTok aesthetics or whatever you want to call them. I wonder if you may have noticed a word repeating itself a wee bit. We’re no longer women, we’re now, in fact, perpetually girls. And honestly, I don’t think that’s an accident. A girl is easier to package than a woman, easier to sell back to herself, easier to reduce to a mood board and an Amazon storefront; a girl can be a Pinterest board. But a woman, she has contradictions and weird phases and a jacket she’s had since she was seventeen that doesn’t go with anything, but she’ll never get rid of, and quite frankly, that’s a lot harder to shift units with. The word girl implies youth, softness, the kind of smallness that makes you easy to categorise and easier to market to. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly the point.

As Rayne Fisher-Quann, aka the Internet Princess, famously stated in her essay “Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters,”

“It’s become very common online for women to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or aspire to consume…the aesthetics of consumption have in turn become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable.”

These ‘aesthetics’ previously known as subcultures are now entirely about consumption; it’s no longer about politics and musical taste but more about buying or being perceived as someone who might buy something. For example, the quiet luxury trend was not about actually being rich and being quiet and graceful about it, but in fact, the point was more for people to think that you might be.

And although many would argue, really, there’s no such thing as personal style - cue the cerulean blue scene from The Devil Wears Prada - there’s no denying that across all media, people both facially and in terms of fashion are all starting to look the same, slowly moulding into one big beige lip flip slick back bunned fox eyed blob. Yet to make ourselves seem original, we declare that we’re wearing these items in a different way than the ‘other girls’.

“I’m not wearing Ugg boots in a clean girl way, I’m wearing them in an off-duty ballerina Slavic girl winter way”

Okay, girl, whatever you say. Either way, you’re still following the trend, and these big corporations don’t care whether your shoes are being worn in a basic way or a coquettish way because the money is still going into their pockets.

It’s become a performance of proximity, who got there first, who’s wearing it in the right way or the new way, who is in the know, who started the trend or really gets the trend and who is just a follower, like seriously if I had a quid for everytime I heard or even said myself “but they just don’t GET IT like I do” I would be lying on a beach in Thailand right now.

We speak of those with basic style as less than not for political reasons, or because we want to help the less fashion inclined, but because we want to inflate our own egos, we are better than you because we chose to follow a different trend. Although you may deem it as cooler, a trend is a trend, no matter the outcome.

And it’s not just how we dress, it’s who gets to be in the room. There’s a Reel doing the rounds at the moment that’s said what we’ve all been thinking – stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.

Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about? Apparently not, babes. Open bar, free food and a branded photobooth? Guess we’ll see you at the next one.

We’ve now reached what people call cultural stagnation. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, whenever the aesthetics become politicised, then fascism is in trend, when it seems like art, beauty and fashion have hit a wall because we keep repackaging the same shit. The average person is no longer developing their aesthetic taste, and nothing feels new because we only seek algorithmic approval, so our taste is intrinsically tied to whatever gives us the most social clout. After being told what is considered to be the pinnacle of beauty, we find ourselves all trying to wear the faces of Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner while trying to achieve the bodies of the likes of Gracie Abrams (convincing women to dedicate all their energy to worrying about their weight is a whole other conversation). And we really do sit and complain about “everybody looks the same” until somebody actually looks different, then we hit them with the “Greek gods would go to war for you/ I love your confidence!” type comment section.

We buy bags with pre-added charms and jackets that are pre-distressed because the trend cycles go so fast, our clothing doesn’t even get the chance to feel lived in, everything is a signifier and can’t just be worn because it’s loved, but more to show or prove that you are someone. If she wears tabis, she’s a ‘real’ fashion girl; she goes to art galleries and posts fit check TikToks with her photographer boyfriend; if she wears Arcteryx, she’s chill, she drinks Guinness and goes on hikes for the gram. If she wears fur coats, she loves a messy night out, smokes tabs and is let in everywhere, no questions asked, because she knows the band. If she wears Tom’s trunks, she went to private school, loves drum and bass and goes skiing on the weekends.

None of those things have to be true; we just have to believe that they could be. It’s like we’re all desperately trying to make a point about ourselves, and really we’re all just performative asf. And duh, life itself is a performance, but we’ve essentially turned getting dressed into a personality test we administer to ourselves every morning, desperately asking, are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?

And when you actually clock what these aesthetics are, they are almost entirely built around a femininity that exists to be perceived. Not felt from the inside but read from the outside, filed correctly, appreciated from a distance. Somewhere along the line, the question stopped being how do I want to feel in my clothes and became will they get it? We absorbed the male gaze so young and so completely that we now curate ourselves for it voluntarily, document it ourselves, post it ourselves, tag the brand ourselves and call it self-expression. And babes, that is not self-expression, that is free advertising.

Gen Z gets blamed for this, but it makes sense when you’ve grown up in an attention economy that demands you be legible at a glance. Personal style used to be the accumulation of a life: a concert tee, a dead relative’s coat, shoes worn down on one side. Now it’s a mood board made real, assembled to be read rather than felt. We’re not getting dressed, we’re making a case for ourselves. We’re at a point now where when we see somebody online showcasing their beautiful individual look, we are no longer inspired to find originality for ourselves, but instead find ourselves in comment sections demanding a step-by-step tutorial on how to copy the entire look.

And before you boys get too comfortable, you’re doing it too. The Salomons hiking boy who’s never been further than the Peaks but owns three shell jackets and needs you to know he could survive a Norwegian winter. The moustache mullet patchwork tattoo guy who keeps his keys on a carabiner, the boy who wears vintage band tees and beat-up Sambas, who’s definitely seen Fontaines D.C. four times and will tell you that every time you play ‘Favourite’. The raw denim enthusiast in full Oni selvedge who’s been to Japan once, visited one workshop in Kojima, and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. The record store guy in a deadstock flannel and New Balance 574s who needs you to know he has the original pressing and absolutely did not find it on Discogs. The “I don’t really follow fashion” boy who somehow owns every single piece from the Uniqlo U drop and is inexplicably head to toe Margaret Howell. The skater boy who hasn’t been on a board since 2019 but exclusively wears Rassvet, Fucking Awesome and one very specific Supreme drop from 2017, he got resale. The “I just threw this on” boy in a perfectly proportioned Rick Owens leather and Lemaire trousers, who, to make it clear, did not ‘just throw it on’.

Men have spent years mocking women for being trend-followers while quietly developing their own just as rigid aesthetic uniforms. The difference is they call it “having taste” rather than following a trend, which is somehow the most on-brand thing imaginable.

There was absolutely no need for us to reduce our interests to an aesthetic, to fit people into boxes. You are a complex, contradictory, multidimensional person; you are allowed to play and explore and like multiple styles of clothes and decor all at once. Not everything has to be curated to fit into a repostable TikTok. Unless it’s a really good one, in which case send it my way.

That’s precisely why Russell T Davies’ newest project, Tip Toe, with the catchline Love Thy Neighbour, Judge Thy Neighbour, feels so painfully relevant right now.

Tip Toe holds a mirror up to a contemporary society engulfed by toxic algorithms that spread hatred and misinformation, often at the expense of minority communities. In this case, the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s a brutal yet deeply real portrayal of how dangerous prejudice becomes when we allow it to consume us.

For actress Iz Hesketh, who plays Zee, the role could not have arrived at a more significant time.

Growing up in Skelmersdale, Iz describes herself as having been “the L, the G, the B, the T and the Q”, and she shares a great deal with Zee. Both are fierce trans women with enormous hearts, something Iz immediately recognised when she first connected with the character.

“We’re basically the same person,” she says.

But finding the differences between herself and Zee became a crucial part of the process.

“A big thing I had to deal with with Zee was figuring out how we were different because we were so similar. So I did a map of our lives, how we start the same, and where we kind of turn into different people.

“It was actually my mum who said, ‘Don’t play yourself.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I kind of am playing myself.’ So it became about figuring out how I could stay true to myself without literally playing myself.

“She’s very strong-willed, very strong-minded. Once she’s decided something, that’s kind of it. There’s no changing her mind. She’s a love letter to all of the Northern women that I grew up with and love.

“I lost my nan during filming, which was a huge thing in my life. She practically brought me up, and there’s so much of my nan and my mum in Zee. She’s this new-age Northern trans woman that I think people will relate to regardless of their differences.

“So yeah, that’s Zee Malone.”

Trans representation in media is especially important right now. We’re living in an algorithm-driven culture swamped with anti-trans rhetoric and exhausting, often harmful discourse around things like gendered bathrooms. Like, let people piss in peace. So, having trans people with lived experiences at the centre of stories like Tip Toe, offering perspectives that may be entirely new to some viewers, feels incredibly poignant.

“The amazing thing about Russell’s writing is that everyone is flawed in some way. One of Zee’s main flaws, to me, is that she acts before she fully thinks. But she acts out of love. To her, it feels like the right thing to do, the truest thing to do.

“But sometimes she doesn’t fully think through the consequences because she’s still quite young herself.”

Reflecting on the importance of allowing trans characters to exist as fully realised people, rather than perfect representations designed purely to make audiences comfortable, Iz delves deeper.

“I don’t feel like we often see very flawed trans characters. I think that if people want to put trans people on television, they want to do it justice and put us in a good light, which is nice. But the truth is, we’re normal people. And I think the only way people are going to see us as normal people is if we’re played as normal people.

“So the big thing for me is that every character I play is a normal, flawed person.”

Zee’s queerness is integral to the show. However, it isn’t the only subject Tip Toe explores. The series examines the intersection of dangerous narratives and the ways the erosion of community impacts everyone, regardless of how they identify.

“I don’t think, even when we filmed it, we knew just how prevalent the show could end up feeling at this exact moment. At the time, it felt like trans people were being made public enemy number one. Now it feels like that hatred has shifted slightly towards immigrants, and the show touches on that too.

“I think the show really speaks to the disconnection between people, and how that’s becoming our undoing as a society. All we really have to do is see each other as human and be willing to understand one another.

“That’s why the slogan, ‘Love thy neighbour’, feels so important. If you think about the biblical meaning behind that phrase, it’s repeated for a reason. All you have to do is love people unconditionally, respect each other, and trust that care is mutual for the world to be a better place. The show explores what happens when we do that, but also what happens when we don’t.

“It touches on trans issues, toxic masculinity, immigration, women’s rights, politics, queer elders, and the loss of queer spaces. One of the biggest themes in the show is that we’re losing so many queer spaces.

“My character represents a younger queer generation that sometimes feels like those spaces aren’t as necessary anymore because we’re more integrated into society. But Zee also has the privilege of moving through the world in a way that other people may not, and I think the show is really aware of that.”

“All of the bar staff are queer people, so members of the queer community are going to see themselves reflected there straight away. We’ve got a Black plus-sized non-binary actor playing the bar manager. We’ve got a Black trans woman who plays Hannah, and Gabriel, who plays this Italian Only Fans coded gay guy. There are so many different kinds of people in the show.

“You see yourself reflected in the queer elders, too, with Paul Rhys, who plays Melba. Then you’ve got middle-aged women through Elizabeth’s character, middle-aged gay men through Alan’s character, the straight dad, the young queer son, and the older ally brother. There are just so many different people from so many different walks of life.

“It’s a show where everyone can see themselves reflected somewhere. And I think that then makes people realise, ‘This could happen to someone like me.’ Whether it’s your boss, your friend, or your neighbour.

“It’s a show that really makes people realise how quickly situations can change when they’re fuelled by insecurity and hate.”

It’s easy to get stuck in your own echo chamber. For many of us in minority communities, or those close to people who are, the struggles are already familiar, especially in an increasingly hostile society in the UK.

However, Tip Toe, airing on Channel 4, plays an important role in challenging far-right narratives amplified through algorithms and misinformation. In an era of far-right AI slop flooding online spaces, this suburban thriller aims to cut through the noise.

“I really do believe it will be the catalyst for true change,” says Iz. “Art, media and culture are the perfect way to move conversations out of Westminster, because let’s be honest, they’re not doing anything for us down there, especially for us in the North.

“The fact that it’s set in the North is such a good choice because I feel like things are politically more intense here at the moment. I’m from Skelmersdale, which actually just voted for Reform, and I’m honestly terribly disappointed.”

Working with Russell T Davies feels like a full-circle moment for Iz, who says his writing has inspired her both on and off screen for most of her life.

“When I was younger, I just wanted to be Rose Tyler. Doctor Who was such a huge part of my life growing up, so working with Russell has genuinely been a dream come true.

“For my eighth birthday, we went to Blackpool for the Doctor Who exhibition. I had a Dalek cake, a TARDIS wardrobe, and all the figures. Doctor Who was my shit. David Tennant and Billie Piper were everything to me growing up.

“I loved that Rose Tyler was from a council estate, because I’m from a really working-class background too, and I could see so much of myself in her.

“Russell gave me so many heroes when I was younger who fought with their hearts and their minds, not their muscles. As a young queer kid, that was the epitome of greatness to me because I didn’t have those muscles, and I didn’t have that confidence. So the idea that you could fight for good with your heart and your brain meant so much to me.”

It’s also a reminder of how crucial working-class representation in film and television truly is. Characters like Rose Tyler gave Iz someone to recognise herself in growing up, and stories shaped by people with genuine lived experience have the power to inspire an entirely new generation of working-class creatives. At a time when the industry is increasingly dominated by middle-class and well-connected voices, perspectives rooted in real communities feel more important than ever.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a RADGE interview without asking Iz what she thought was radge - my scouse diva’s never disappoint, “Pound bakery now, girl. Get that curry sausage roll. I also think it’s fucking radge that in London now, if you get off a bus and get on another one, you get charged twice.”

The five-part series begins on Sunday, 31 May, on Channel 4 at 9 pm.

Heatwaves get treated like a novelty or even a treat. Don’t get me wrong, I am loving the weather. I practically beg for it all year round; any inkling of sunshine and heat, I act as if it is the second coming of Christ. I drag disposable barbecues to parks, complain about not having air conditioning for a week, and then move on as though thirty-five-degree heat in May is somehow normal. But something is unsettling about how quickly we have normalised extreme weather in this country, as though it is a random act of nature rather than a political consequence.

In recent years, the Met Office has repeatedly warned that climate change is making the country’s heatwaves more frequent and more intense. A lot more intense.

They aren’t just a few days of mid to late 20’s, they are extended periods of over 30’s with almost tropical-like storms following soon after. Heatwaves like the summer of 2018 are now around thirty times more likely because of human-caused climate change.

The ten warmest years recorded in the UK have all happened since 2002, and temperatures above 40°C are now considered a realistic possibility. Yet the government response still feels painfully unserious regardless of who is in power.

We are always shocked that roads buckle, our shoes melt to the pavement, hospitals overheat, and public transport collapses, despite scientists’ warnings for decades that this was coming.

Heatwaves are just inconvenient if you live in a well-insulated home with access to gardens, fans, cold water, and flexible working. The rich in our society experience climate change as a discomfort; they can afford to leave the country to go somewhere cooler, or can afford the luxury of a private pool, a swanky private members club, and air-conditioning.

Sadly, everyone else will begin to experience heatwaves as a serious risk. They are dangerous if you live in overcrowded housing, rely on public transport, or work physical jobs outside. Hospitals become unbearable, tower blocks trap heat, and vulnerable people are left to deal with the consequences, whilst politicians tell us to drink more water, enjoy the sunshine, and keep our windows closed. During previous UK heatwaves, thousands of deaths were recorded, particularly amongst elderly and vulnerable people. It will happen again; the proof is in the pudding.

Regardless of our impending climate doom, governments continue to support systems that worsen it. Over the last few years, we have watched Israel drop tonnes of bombs across the Middle East. They even admitted to dropping 135,000 bombs in recent years of conflict, including 23,860 bombs requested directly by ground forces in Gaza and Lebanon. If we know anything about Israeli reporting, we can assume that the number is probably a lot higher than that. In ten minutes, they dropped over 100 bombs on Lebanon.

Bombs do not just destroy buildings and kill civilians. One bomb will contaminate water, poison the air quality, and, due to surrounding fires after detonation, be the cause of enormous amounts of CO₂. Now imagine that, over a hundred times, every single day.

Yet conversations around climate change in the UK often focus on whether ordinary people recycle enough or if your wardrobe is thrifted enough, whilst military destruction escapes serious scrutiny. Military destruction, which has been aided and funded by our government, may I add.

The genocide in Palestine, and the ruthless bombing of Lebanon and Iran, are humanitarian catastrophes but also environmental ones. Entire areas have been reduced to rubble, infrastructure destroyed, and emissions released on a massive scale through bombardment and military activity. The environment will continue to be damaged long after the bombing stops. And that is only looking at Israel.

Our King just visited the USA, where their sweeping oil blockade of Cuba and embargo have heavily impacted the island’s domestic environmental issues. Cuba has been prevented by the US from securing the fuel, infrastructure, and international funding needed to sustain basic environmental management.

These governments claim to care about climate targets but continue funding wars with our taxes and exporting weapons whilst acting as though climate collapse can be solved through David Attenborough begging us to be nicer to the planet.

At the same time, these Western countries are rapidly expanding data centres to support AI systems, cloud storage and endless online consumption. These centres require enormous amounts of electricity and water to function, but they are framed as clean, futuristic technology. Research into the environmental burden of data centres found they accounted for more than 4% of US electricity consumption and produced over 100 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in a single year.

Yet we are being spoon-fed AI constantly and being forced to become one non-thinking blob of a society. Almost every image generated and every cloud backup exists in a physical building somewhere that consumes energy. You may get a few laughs out of the image, then forget about it, but then it is being added into a giant AI bubble, which is actively affecting our lives. And people will turn around and say again, “individuals need to stop using it”, which, yes, we do, but the absolute sheer scale that companies and governments are using AI now is unprecedented.

What makes all of this even more frustrating is how individualised climate conversations have become. People are encouraged to feel guilty for their choice whilst corporations, governments and military systems continue producing emissions on a scale ordinary people could never match.

Heatwaves expose political priorities and who is deemed to matter more than anything else. Britain keeps treating extreme heat as though it is temporary, but this is no longer abnormal weather. This is the future of the country, and the people in power knowingly created it whilst ignoring warnings, protecting profits and refusing meaningful change. It is a massive sign of political failure, and we need to start looking around at what is causing it and why our government is so happily skipping into a political abyss that will cause this to worsen for years to come.