The UK and the US are both heading towards national elections. In the next couple of years almost every major democracy will also hold the most important national elections in their systems. Previous elections in the UK and the US and a referendum in the UK saw spikes in political disinformation online, as well as online exercises in profiling and targeting for the purpose of political influencing. Similar activities have been identified around elections worldwide.

The online influencing that happens around these coming elections will not simply be repeats of what we have seen before. Since the last US and UK general elections, artificial intelligence has continued to develop fast. New applications including large language models have been developed, and some have become widely available. It is very likely that some of these new tools will be used in attempts to influence the functioning and the outcomes of those elections. Some of those uses may fall within the range of safe and legitimate political activity. Others may be harmful and even dangerous to democratic processes.

Collectively, we should improve our understanding of what could go wrong and how we should be protected from new harms, before the elections take place.

How could AI applications threaten elections?

AI tools might be used to affect elections in several ways, including these.

• Creating and spreading misinformation and disinformation
• Undue manipulation of public opinion
• Targeting voters with personalised content without informed consent
• Hacking election systems
• Disrupting civil society around elections

In practice, these different modes could well be used in combination. As well as increasing disruption, that could lead to cumulative loss of confidence in the election process and its results.

None of these types of threat are new. All have featured in attempts to disrupt elections in the past. However, AI applications may have potential to multiply the effectiveness, volume and frequency across all these categories of threat. Where generative AI technologies (that themselves create and distribute new information and expressions of information) are involved in particular, potentially harmful applications are becoming available to a very wide range of individual actors. A Russian propaganda technique that has been called the “firehose of falsehood” involves broadcasting messages at speed and through many channels. AI applications may make similar effects more widely achievable.

Increasing use of some AI tools may also add challenges to traditional modes of oversight, regulatory action and explainability in relation to online techniques for influencing, for instance making it difficult to detect and justify why a particular content item was shown to a particular individual at one time and in one online context.

Creating and spreading misinformation and disinformation: AI applications can be used to create news articles, social media posts, photos, soundbites and videos designed to mislead voters and influence their voting choices or decisions to vote at all. This category covers a wide range of types of online content, from mistakes, misattributions and misinterpretations, across a spectrum to orchestrated campaigns using AI applications to generate realistic-looking deepfake video.

There is plenty of content to draw on to make new disinformation appear credible. There is also plenty of past disinformation to inform developers on what tropes tend to get the most traction.

This category overlaps with targeting, as content could be tailored to the beliefs and biases of individual voters or groups. These types of content may be intended to achieve specific changes in voting intention, but at the same time have a broader objective in poisoning public discourse and wearing down confidence in it.

As well as making it easier to lie, widespread public expectation of deepfakes may create a “liar’s dividend: a means for political figures to dismiss real evidence against them, described by Robert Chesney and Daniella Keats Citron.

As the public becomes more aware of the idea that video and audio can be convincingly faked, some will try to escape accountability for their actions by denouncing authentic video and audio as deep fakes. Put simply: a skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence.

Undue manipulation of public opinion: AI applications could be used to manipulate public opinion and behaviour online in other ways, by creating or reinforcing echo chambers in online fora, where people are only exposed to information that confirms their existing beliefs. This can make it more difficult for voters to make informed choices.

Research on filter bubbles has suggested that risks from them have sometimes been overestimated. People can be exposed to a range of opinions and materials online, that leave them better informed and more able to identify disinformation. Newer applications may increase or accelerate the capability to cause groups to align, form and act collectively.

As we will explore below, this is an area where it can be hard to define exactly what is acceptable. Political campaigning is intended to influence opinion, and should be allowed to do so. However, techniques that mislead people about the opinions of others and encourage polarising separation into opposing online groups based on disinformation may fall beyond the limits of what is acceptable.

Targeting voters with personalised political content without informed consent: Social media can be used to target voters with political ads that are specifically tailored to their interests and demographics. Records of previous activity could be used to influence voters’ choices, especially if the ads are designed to exploit their fears or prejudices. AI applications could increase the effectiveness of the direction of content to individuals based on data on what would influence them, and even at what time of day they might be most open to influence. Bespoke chatbots could frame interactions aimed at voter characteristics, changing and honing messages, at relatively low costs to those aiming to influence.

Hacking election systems: AI applications could be used to hack into online systems for voter registration and for voting (where those are in use). Attacks could extract personal data for subsequent targeted actions (for instance of people likely to use alternatives to voting in person). Attacks on voting systems could nullify, alter or misreport votes. AI-enabled cyberattacks could potentially bring down whole election systems, delaying or making impossible accurate announcement of outcomes.

Attacks on systems present a serious threat to the integrity of elections. There is a secondary threat that attacks on parts of the system can undermine confidence in the whole and give credibility to allegations about the integrity of the process.

Disrupting civil society around elections: AI-enabled cyber-attacks could potentially be directed against a very wide range of targets that support the civil society in which elections happen. Cyber-attacks might be directed to create traffic jams, power outages, or other obstacles that make it difficult for people to vote. This would suppress voter turnout but might also be targeted to certain places and populations, skewing the impact on election outcomes in favour or against some parties and candidates.

In fact, all of these categories of interference have potential uses not just in changing how people vote, but in changing who votes, in what is known as voter suppression. Particular social and local groups could be targeted with techniques and messages that seek to misrepresent candidates they might be expected to vote for, confuse them with conflicting messages, discount the value of voting at all, and falsely undermine the probity and security of the election system.

Countering AI interference in elections

Comprehensively addressing these threats may require effective collaboration between governments, law enforcement organisations, media, civil society organisations, and the tech industry. There are already ways to address disinformation and manipulation online, some of which may benefit from updates to address the specific challenges posed by use of AI applications. Recognition of risks by governments is growing, as expressed in a 2019 Declaration by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.

Fine grained, sub-conscious and personalised levels of algorithmic persuasion may have significant effects on the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their right to form opinions and take independent decisions. These effects remain underexplored but cannot be underestimated.

Governments and regulators should explore ways to promote transparency specifically in the use of AI in elections.

Social media companies are major channels for the spread of disinformation online, and Governments already require them to take action to remove particularly dangerous categories of illegal content. Governments could increase requirements on these companies to take additional steps to prevent the spread of disinformation, removing fake accounts and posts, labelling misleading content generated by AI applications, and critically examining targeting techniques.

In August 2023 the US Federal Election Commission announced that it had launched a rule-making process on AI deepfakes for political purposes. Election law already prohibits the fraudulent misrepresentation of candidates and campaigns. This change, if taken through, would “make it clear that the related statutory prohibition applies to deliberately deceptive Artificial Intelligence (AI) campaign advertisements” as well.

It may be appropriate to require labelling of auto-generated political content online and of the use of AI otherwise in political communications and campaigns. The White House recently announced seven “Voluntary Commitments from Leading Artificial Intelligence Companies to Manage the Risks Posed by AI”. One of these was a commitment “to developing robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system.” Any such systems would require careful monitoring of actual effects in society as AI becomes more ubiquitous. These are unlikely to resolve all risks from autogenerated disinformation, but should make a difference.

Google has already begun to deliver on this commitment, launching a tool that “embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of an image, making it imperceptible to the human eye, but detectable for identification.” A valuable step in itself, this should also encourage parallel and competitive action from others.

What may be uncertain right now is how effective and resilient platforms’ processes will prove in the face of the greatly increased quantity and variety of online disinformation which may be enabled by more recent technology developments. Part of the challenge is achieving clear, consistent and impactful application of terms and conditions in relation to novel content. Part is about resources: keeping up with the quantity of misleading material, which tends to peak before elections. Part is technical: improving tools for detecting, labelling and removing content and identifying bad actors as they improve their tools for creating convincing content.

Detecting disinformation is a literal race to act fast enough on dangerous content before it has effects. From the longer perspective it is also an unremitting arms race. A recent European Commission report stated that “in many cases the mitigation measures introduced by online platforms failed to account for the Kremlin’s malign intent and full scope of information warfare tactics employed on online platforms.”

Social media companies have developed their capabilities in this regard, but not as much as many civil society organisations would like them to do. For government to act legitimately to induce the platforms to do more, we may need a more urgent and thorough conversation about what we role social media should play in democratic societies.

Governments can invest in election oversight and security (including cybersecurity), and in the skills and capability of independent regulators for elections and data protection and use. They can invest in training of election officials on recognising and addressing emerging threats.

Political parties could commit to clear shared commitments on how they will use new technologies in campaigning. Public debate could better establish a collective understanding of what is acceptable practice and what is not.

Governments can increase support for “independent, evidence-based and interdisciplinary research and advice for decision-makers regarding the capacity of algorithmic tools to enhance or interfere with the cognitive sovereignty of individuals”, as the Council of Europe put it. Governments can collaborate more internationally to improve shared understanding of threats, and they can share good practice in protecting elections. Some of this is currently left to non-governmental organisations with limited and intermittent funding.

The online public, the users of platform services, can do more to protect themselves and democratic processes, if they are sufficiently aware of the risks of AI-enabled disinformation. A 2022 Ofcom report on Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes suggested that some people do not recognise when online content is misleading, and others overestimate their own ability to do so.

• There was often a gap between people’s confidence in being able to recognise advertising, identify a scam message or judge the veracity of online content, and their ability to do this when shown examples.
• A third of internet users were unaware of the potential for inaccurate or biased information online; 6% of internet users believed that all the information they find online is truthful and 30% of internet users don’t know – or don’t think about – whether the information they find is truthful or not.

A general, thorough education and up-skilling across society is needed to ensure that power to recognise and deal with threats is distributed as any concentrated power is a potential threat to democracy. Governments and online service providers could do more to educate the public about how new threats could manifest and be recognised as such. Helping voters make informed choices could include teaching them how to spot misinformation, or how to protect their personal data from being used by political campaigns.

The rapid evolution of online tools can help as well as threaten. Online applications nudge users to check facts or direct them to alternative information sources, as Richard Mackenzie-Gray Scott has recently explored.

Digital nudges have the potential to reduce the spread of misinformation on these platforms and may well be the least rights-intrusive means of doing so when compared to alternatives (with the possible exception of user reporting).

However, as he also explains, these rely on the same kind of techniques used for spreading misinformation and manipulating opinion, and can easily run up against principles and law protecting freedom of thought and opinion.

Why is this difficult to address?

There are constraints on governments’ ability and willingness to act in this area. Some of these are also important to democracy, so there are real tensions. Other constraints have less principled causes, but are still relevant.

Governments in liberal democracies are rightly concerned with protecting free speech online, and can be uncomfortable about being seen to curtail it or to impose standards of what is acceptable political activity. Authoritarian governments often constrain or switch off internet traffic around elections. Many democratic governments want to avoid even the appearance of doing anything similar.

Even with the best intentions, regulating to suppress some kinds of political expression can involve making distinctions that are difficult to define or to apply consistently. Some material can be easy to condemn, for instance wholly fictional misleading deepfake material. Some misleading online content may be much harder to judge as going beyond what should be protected as free expression. Legislative processes are designed to create regulation that works in practice, that can as far as possible be easily understood by the public and by companies who need to follow and sometimes implement it. It is not straightforward to write rules that deliver acceptable balance between freedom of speech and public protection, when the range of what is possible changes quickly.

There are generic obstacles to regulating to prevent misuse of general purpose technologies which also have many legal and beneficial uses. Governments can make specific misuses illegal, but effective preventive measures are always more difficult where it is not possible or reasonable to limit any access to the technology. Communications technologies can fall into that group, and the internet is perhaps the supreme example. Open source large language models may be another class.

In terms of new tools including generative AI, proprietary and open source present different challenges to potential regulation. Open source tools are more available for misuse, but it may be easier to anticipate and address the variety of potential misuse. Proprietary tools offer less transparency, but may in other respects be easier to focus regulation and governmental influence on.

Governments are led by politicians who have a strong interest in the freedom to make political arguments and to influence voters, using all legitimate tools available. Many politicians like campaigning, and relish the opportunity to show that they are better at it than the competition. For some, that includes showing that they are better at using new tools and channels. That can be part of a pitch to appear more modern and technocratically competent.

Even relatively small changes by governments to election law and to election institutions can become the focus of suspicion, and that suspicion may often be justified. Elected politicians may not be the best arbiters of what is appropriate political campaigning. Even where they set rules, it may be better in terms of transparency and public confidence to keep them at a distance from applying them.

Major internet platforms present special challenges for governments, in relation to maintaining a public information sphere. Liberal democracies are constitutionally opposed to regulating collective public access to information. Unrestricted marketplaces for information and opinion are sometimes seen as the most important of free markets. Governments have been reluctant to take strong positions on online platforms’ intermediary role in transmitting information, where that does not involve acts or material that clearly break existing laws.

At the same time, online social media platforms create peculiar challenges to maintenance of a shared public reality. Everyone does not see the same material. Typically, social media platforms are designed to affect user behaviour online, to increase time spent online, and to give people what they want to see or are engaged by seeing. The business model relies on the capacity to target users with adverts that they are individually more likely to be influenced by, using accumulated information about individuals to customise their experiences, and to increase the capability of the influence over time. The platforms aim to do this without making the influencing or the personalisation too overt, so parts of the system are effectively hidden from the targets.

Platforms are reluctant to give up any part of this capability, or disclose more about it than they are obliged to, because achieving personalisation at scale in targeted advertising is a key source of competitive advantage for them. Even though much internet activity is funded on the capability of online advertising to change behaviour, there are (perhaps surprisingly, given the scale of the businesses and markets) many questions about online influencing: how it works, how well it works, and when and why it works particularly well, and what it (so far) cannot do. People and their representatives cannot seek redress from harms they cannot perceive or evaluate. Governments and regulators have not had access to much of the relevant data held by the global internet platforms.

Meanwhile, governments can be reluctant to admit that they do not fully understand what is happening in important markets. They may also be reluctant to admit that they are uncertain about the potential seriousness of emerging threats, for fear of being accused of sleeping on the job.

Perhaps we should not expect governments to have very clear ideas about how to regulate increasing capability for online influencing for political purposes, when they have not formed firm positions, principles or regulatory tools in relation to the increasing power of online influencing for commercial purposes.

The focus of existing legislation may leave gaps, in particular around collective interests. Most data protection law establishes individual rights to prevent harms to individual people. These have already arguably proved to have limitations either for protecting single citizens from the strategies of very large companies, for addressing the growth of data-enabled power in internet markets, or for addressing collective social impacts.

The House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has recently published its interim report on the governance of artificial intelligence. In an evidence submission to the Committee, Dr Steve Rolf gave a relevant example.

The draft AIA [ draft EU Artificial Intelligence Act ], for instance, includes outright bans on decision-making algorithms in cases where they pose a threat to ‘safety, livelihoods and rights of people’. While this places important emphasis on individual rights (somewhat absent in China’s approach) it does little to  address societal-level harms. An illustration of such harms might be impacts on democratic processes — for example, algorithmic recommendations on social media platforms that discourage wavering voters from turning out, thus tipping the balance in an election.

In relation to political influencing and protecting elections in particular, there is a need for better information and guidance based on global experiences. Given the number and variety of online actions to influence elections worldwide, much remains unknown about what kind of campaigns achieve influence, and about what works in countering inappropriate activity. Even around the better known examples including Russian interference in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum, and the actions of Cambridge Analytica, there is still uncertainty about how much outcomes of election processes were affected.

This is changing. Recently, four papers were published with results from a major research project involving researchers from Meta and several institutions examining the influence of Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on political news exposure in the US 2020 election. High level conclusions were that algorithms were extremely influential in users’ on-platform experiences, there was significant ideological segregation in political news exposure on Facebook, but that algorithms that determine what users saw did not sway political attitudes.

This kind of research, which is likely to be further examined and challenged, should ultimately make for a better shared understanding of how the internet intersects with collective political life.

A particular knowledge gap right now in governments and the public sphere is around just what is coming next: how much more effective tools for influencing online behaviour have become since 2016. The expectation, extrapolating along a path-dependency for the major platforms, is that improvements will have been made possible by more data, compute power and innovations, including innovations driven by AI. But what those improvements have been, and what they mean for the power to influence online, are not clear from outside major technology companies. Increases in capability may not have been linear. Creators of tools almost certainly do not know every purpose they can applied to. This is all moving very fast, as was pointed out in a recent report from the Brennan Center, “How AI Puts Elections at Risk”.

The launch of ChatGPT just weeks after the 2022 midterm election on November 30, 2022, has precipitated a new era in which many people regularly converse with AI systems and read content produced by AI.

Even that is beginning to seem some time ago, in the scale of the generative AI era.

The major technology companies and their moderation policies are also subjects of political observation and critique, while they are active lobbyists themselves. They are frequently accused of censoring content from different sources disproportionately and in line with perceived political biases. Recent research has suggested different large language models can be placed on a map of political predispositions. In AI ethics, there has been a divide between those pointing to current problems resulting from use of AI applications in ways that affect the public now, and those looking to the further future. Predilection to one or other view of where to focus also appears increasingly to fall across older political divides.

It is challenging in this context to establish the political objectivity which we would want from organisations acting to protect democracy. This should improve the case for augmented independent expert oversight and regulation of elections. There should be more clarity on what uses of personal data are legitimate for political purposes, in particular in relation to emerging technologies, and around elections.

Risks to elections can be different in form and potential impact in different states. States that have relatively weaker election security and oversight, or lack civil society safeguards including established independent media, may be subject to different and potentially more impactful orchestrated online campaigns.

They may also be used as experimental spaces. It is already evident that techniques for influencing an election in one country have been trialled, honed and subsequently reapplied in other countries. Collectively, all democracies should benefit from shared research, combined with informed assessments of developing capabilities offered by AI that help to imagine what could come next.

Personal data and UK elections: an update

In this context, the electorate could reasonably demand clarity in law relating to how personal data is used politically online, and stability, confidence and independence in the organisations responsible for oversight of elections. However, a lot has happened recently in this space.

Legislative changes in the UK have given political parties more rather than less scope in their use of personal data. The 2018 UK Data Protection Act included new exemptions to some restrictions on use of personal data. One of the amendments specifically permits political organisations to make use without consent of “personal data revealing political opinions”, where that  “is necessary for the purposes of the person’s or organisation’s political activities” including “campaigning, fund-raising, political surveys and case-work”.

One obvious problem here is that this is a new provision, untested around a UK general election, so we do not know how political parties will make use of it. In a time when technologies for influencing online are evolving quickly, that is not reassuring.

The exemption does not give political parties an entirely free hand. The Information Commissioner’s guidance of lawful basis elaborates.

Many of the lawful bases for processing depend on the processing being “necessary”. This does not mean that processing has to be absolutely essential. However, it must be more than just useful, and more than just standard practice. It must be a targeted and proportionate way of achieving a specific purpose. The lawful basis will not apply if you can reasonably achieve the purpose by some other less intrusive means, or by processing less data.

This should put pressure on political parties to assess and justify their processes. However, that justification might only be sought after an election has happened. Given the potential for using novel methods relying on newer technologies, there is an argument for requiring more explanation and justification around what political parties are doing with personal data, to regulators if not in public releases.

There are potentially good arguments for political parties having access to certain classes of information about voters. If they know more about citizens, they should be able to better develop policies to understand and address their needs. However, political parties should have those rights only through collective consent, following well-informed national debate informed by full and shared understanding of what might be done with the information with available and emerging technologies.

The government’s current Data Protection and Digital Information Bill includes new provisions supporting the use of unsolicited direct email for political objectives, and enables the government to make future regulations to enable direct marketing for democratic engagement.

Other changes made and proposed relate to election process and oversight. The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill also proposes to reduce the independence of the Information Commissioner’s Office (the UK’s independent regulator protecting information rights) remove the Surveillance Camera and Biometrics Commissioner, and reduce the requirements for organisations using the personal data of UK citizens to have independent Data Protection Officers and undertake Privacy Impact Assessments. The 2022 Elections Act placed the Electoral Commission, the body which oversees elections and regulates political finance in the UK, under the supervision of a government minister. The Commission had previously been independent of government and accountable directly to parliament. Civil society organisations have criticised the changes, both those made and those proposed.

Also in recent news, the Electoral Commission announced on 8th August that it had been the target of a complex cyber-attack in which “the perpetrators had access to the Commission’s servers which held our email, our control systems, and copies of the electoral registers.” The incursion was identified in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected, and it became clear that hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021. The registers to which access was gained included the name and address of anyone in Great Britain who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, of overseas voters, and of voters registered in Northern Ireland in 2018.

The Commission acknowledges risks to the public from subsequent use of the data in combination with data from other sources.

According to the risk assessment used by the Information Commissioner’s Office to assess the harm of data breaches, the personal data held on the electoral registers – typically name and address – does not in itself present a high risk to individuals. It is possible however that this data could be combined with other data in the public domain, such as that which individuals choose to share themselves, to infer patterns of behaviour or to identify and profile individuals.

Among its other responsibilities, the Commission works “to promote public confidence in the democratic process and ensure its integrity.” Undermining that confidence may have been a key objective of the attack, aside from subsequent use of the data. Many commentators have asked why the Commission waited months to announce that the attack had taken place.

Many of these developments on their own may have small or ephemeral effects on individuals or in the short term, but together they may leave UK citizens concerned about what may be done with their personal data to influence their voting decisions. At the moment, there is a worrying of well-informed public debate about how untested changes to relevant laws and organisations could affect delivery of elections, in an environment of serious and growing technological challenges.

Political parties could seek to reassure the public by making disclosures and binding commitments about how they propose to use citizens’ data in forthcoming elections, and in particular how they intend to develop and use AI applications with that data. In line with the Information Commissioner’s guidance, they could explain in advance of elections why the use is “a targeted and proportionate way of achieving a specific purpose”. This could be a matter for public discussion before the event, and not only for the work of a small number of poorly-funded investigative journalists afterwards.

In May, the Government published further proposals to amend the Elections Act, which included confirmation that a new online registration service is in development. That should be subject to extensive public scrutiny, given the growth in potential threats.

Where do we go from here?

The UK will only realise full benefits of AI if we can collectively develop more confidence in the governance and regulation of new technologies. That confidence also must be justified and periodically renewed. Developers of a new wave of applications propose that machines will be able to read our minds soon. We should not have to live in fear of the future, so we need to update protections for freedom of thought and opinion, and freedom to freely choose elected representatives, so these established democratic necessities work under new technological conditions.

Democratic elections are part of what enable society to adapt to the future. We should be able to have confidence that they work fairly, even if we sometimes individually dislike the results. We should demand better accountability, oversight, and transparency around the potential effects of AI systems on elections. We should be reassured that elections are fully protected from threats that will continue to evolve.

Article by Ben Hawes

Authors: Eleanor Beck, Cora Sargeant and Sarah Wright
Published: 2023
Publication: International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology

There is an underrepresentation of women working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) industries. Initiatives to encourage greater diversity in STEM have been less successful in computer science. This research investigates whether identification with gender stereotypes (defined as the extent to which one identifies with stereotypical masculine or feminine traits) and other factors predict enrolment interest in computer science and whether stereotypical cues impact on these relationships. British secondary school students were shown either a stereotypical or a non-stereotypical computer science classroom and completed measures assessing their identification with gender stereotypes, enrolment interest, belonging, stereotype threat, self-efficacy and utility value. Femininity significantly predicted lower enrolment interest and this relationship appeared to be mediated by stereotype threat. This study extends previous research by showing that young peoples’ identification with gender stereotypes predicts enrolment interest to some degree. We highlight the need to challenge persistent stereotypes regarding who best ‘fits’ computer science.

Beck, E., Sargeant, C. & Wright, S. (2023) Exploring the impact of gender identity and stereotypes on secondary pupils’ computer science enrolment interest (2023). International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 15(1), 48–71.

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Authors: Cleo Timney, Sarah Wright, and Cora Sargeant
Published: 2023
Publication: Journal of Homosexuality

Like all young people (YP), those who are gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) spend their youth exploring and discovering their identities; but unlike their peers, they must consider whether, how, and when to disclose their GSD identity to others in a dynamic process of visibility management (VM). At school, GSD YP actively test social reactions, interpret attitudes, and assess safety, ultimately seeking belonging as their authentic selves. Our systematic review explored findings from 16 qualitative studies capturing GSD YPs experiences of managing visibility in schools internationally. Data were thematically synthesized, and seven themes were constructed. The process of visibility management is fluid, a negotiation with social norms that GSD YP’s very existence transgresses. YP search for, and through activism actively shape, accepting environments in which they can safely be their authentic selves. GSD YP are actively asking school staff for help in creating open communities where all YP can find a place to belong, to fight to be visible. We offer some suggestions for how we might begin.

Timney, C., Wright, S. & Sargeant, C. (2023) “If You’re Not Yourself, Who are You Going to be?” an Exploration of Gender and Sexuality Diverse Pupils Experiences of Visibility Management in School: A Systematic Literature Review (2023). Journal of Homosexuality, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2023.2246616

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Authors: Nicole Harris and Sarah Wright
Published: 2023
Publication: DECP Debate

This critique briefly summarises the evolution of the Precision Teaching (PT) approach, exploring what PT is, who it can be used with and its theoretical underpinnings. The results of a systematic literature search exploring the question ‘Is Precision Teaching effective at improving maths skills in school aged children and
young people?’ are then discussed. Based on the five publications reviewed, the interventions that involved PT generally showed greater performance gains than the control or comparison group. Given the highly specific conditions of these interventions however, it is not possible to generalise the intervention effects beyond these studies. It must therefore be concluded that based on these five papers, it is not possible to say whether PT is an effective way to support maths skills. The implications for professional practice suggest a need to establish an evidence base, built around formalised and structured evaluations of PT, that use a control or comparison group. It is suggested that more teachers be involved in this process rather than it being the role of academics. This would enable teachers and Educational Psychologists to speak with more certainty of the efficacy of PT at improving maths skills in school aged children and young people.

This is a pre-publication version of the following article:

Harris, N. & Wright, S. (2023) Precision Teaching for maths: An academic critique (2023). DECP Debate, 186, 6-17. DOI: 10.53841/bpsdeb.2023.1.186.6

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As a researcher still active in the digital age how does it feel to look back on a thesis that you wrote half a century ago?  In what ways was your day-to-day experience of research and writing then so very different from that of today’s postgraduate, and in what ways has nothing changed?  What are the chances today of being left alone for twelve months to write forty thousand words on a subject of one’s own choice?  This autumn marks fifty years since I began my History MA, packing more reading into one year than in the whole of the previous three.  For a future doctoral student this was the perfect apprenticeship.  1973-74 was the year I got drunk with Quentin Bell, took tea with a Fleet Street legend and found myself berated by Stephen Spender – all before I turned twenty-two.  We encourage our students to be adventurous and inquiring, but what chance an MA student in the present cautious climate enjoying the equivalent of a liquid lunch with Virginia Woolf’s nephew?  This is most definitely not a lament for the ‘good old days’, as frankly leaving a young PGR unsupervised for almost a year is indefensible and in different circumstances my thesis might never have been written.  Rather this is the recollection of a world all but disappeared, and yet one that existed within the working lives of older academics still fully engaged with their subjects.

An epic essay on the Copernican revolution and a half-decent degree saw me offered a postgraduate quota award.  The University of Kent at Canterbury was both collegiate and collegial, staff, students and ex-students fitting seamlessly into a small and welcoming cathedral city very different from the tourist behometh of today.  Both graduates and junior lecturers intended moving on and yet somehow never did.  Politics teaching at UKC relied heavily on a cohort of Nuffield College alumni who presumably left Oxford with the intention of one day returning, but who in due course became pillars of the local community.  One of them was Graham Thomas, the idiosyncratic creator of Kent’s British Cartoon Archive.  Students either loved or loathed his final year seminar on fascism.  For me the long anecdotes, the aperçus, the wry humour and the ritual lighting of the untipped Senior Service were all pure joy.  Graham Thomas rescued me when a review panel of early modern historians gently pointed out that a thesis on the working and personal relationship of poet Andrew Marvell and political theorist James Harrington necessitated access to a so far undiscovered cache of correspondence.  I thought I was on safer ground back in the twentieth century until Graham advised that, ‘A thesis on the OAS [The Day of the Jackal was very big at the time] would be terrific, but not if you end up dead in the toilet of a dodgy Marseilles bar.’  With me eager to challenge Orwell’s assertion in ‘Inside the Whale’ that 1920s writers and thinkers were largely apolitical, I suggested ‘The response of British intellectuals to Fascist Italy’.  We shook hands and agreed to meet some time the following year (‘I think I’ll need to see a draft…’ – ten months later the relaxed supervisor turned into an exceptionally rigorous editor).  Graham’s hands-off if high risk approach worked.  So much so that he scarcely changed his modus operandi for my doctoral thesis later in the decade – if minimal supervision worked the first time around then let’s do it again.  The next time common sense prevailed, and I wisely sought experts in the field to compensate for Graham’s light touch.

Back in 1973 the absence of supervision meant no reports, no records of discussion, no agreed objectives ahead of our next meeting, no necessary skills training, and no discussion of future employment opportunities.  There didn’t seem any obvious process for monitoring my progress as a one-year research student.  I didn’t have a funding body keen to know if it was getting value for money; although I’m sure the then Social Science Research Council did request annual reports after I commenced my PhD three years later.

Looking back, it’s striking how little archival work I undertook.  Unlike today undergraduate dissertations rarely involved research off-campus, and this clearly influenced my scheme of work.  I may even have been told that archives were reserved for doctoral research.  In any case many of my primary sources were available in printed form: I profited greatly from the volume of diaries and collected letters published over the preceding decade.  The death of Leonard Woolf and the publication of Michael Holroyd’s ground-breaking biography of Lytton Strachey had prompted a flood of Bloomsbury material, much of it previously unpublished.  Because the Woolfs, Maynard Keynes and various other Bloomsbury illuminati were central to my thesis I contacted Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf’s first biographer.  It was easy: I phoned the University of Sussex switchboard and they put me straight though to Professor Bell.  He invited me to lunch at Falmer, ‘and if we have time then I’ll take you to meet Duncan.’  I’m afraid we never did get to Charleston and a post-prandial stroll with Duncan Grant – how wonderful that would have been.  On the day in question my genial and generous host left me with a deep appreciation of chilled Chablis, an imminent hangover and an empty notebook.

Another enjoyable but ultimately fruitless excursion was to seek advice from Michael Holroyd, biographer extraordinaire.  Outside his pre-gentrification Edwardian villa in Ladbroke Grove I met my first Rastafarians.  Deaf to the drum’n’bass bouncing off his windows Michael made me a pot of tea but announced that he had to leave in twenty minutes – I assumed that he was off to the Garrick or to chair a Society of Authors meeting, but it turned out he was due back at the laundrette.  In general though, the speculative phone call seemed to work as did the chance to meet literary grandees giving guest lectures in Canterbury.  Stephen Spender, eager to talk about WH Auden, found himself persistently questioned about the fascist-sympathising South African writer Roy Campbell.  Spender sent me packing, no doubt venting his spleen in that night’s journal entry.  More accommodating was Sir Colin Coote, who knew the Duce was a wrong ’un from the moment he arrived in Rome.  The reports he filed made uncomfortable reading for many Daily Telegraph readers, but his reputation as an uncompromising foreign correspondent earned him the editor’s chair.  Sir Colin was charming, and a fount of information.  My choice of interviewees was arbitrary, and the results piecemeal, but it added the personal touch to my ever-expanding selection of correspondence, confidences and commentaries: contrary to popular perception, everyone in the 1920s seemed to have an opinion on Mussolini.

Unsurprisingly I wrestled with the definition of intellectuals, drawing on Gramsci and Lucien Goldman and eschewing French cultural theorists (out of ignorance not choice).  David Caute’s work, notably The Fellow Travellers, was a big influence.  I can remember discussing problems of methodology with friends who were back after a year abroad and seemed far more sophisticated than me; and with my drinking companions in the college bar, both of whom were doctoral students destined for stellar business school careers.  I don’t think I met another postgraduate all year, not least because there were so few of us.

For a university only eight years old Kent’s Templeman Library had an impressive stock of books and periodicals.  Long runs of mid-century magazines facilitated case studies of the New Statesman and the Criterion, the former floundering until the arrival of Kingsley Martin and the latter too easily swayed by Ezra Pound’s Blackshirt sympathies.  My reading ambitions could never be fully met in Canterbury, so I decamped to London.  It’s clear from the thesis’s bibliography that completion was only possible thanks to my spending long days seeking out half-forgotten texts at the LSE, and in the old reading room of the British Museum.  Searching for necessary books or journals depended upon bulky guides to requisite libraries (‘Virginia Woolf, diaries vols. I-V, Hogarth Press: BL, BLPES, Sussex’) and whole floors of card catalogue cabinets, each topped with piles of forms on which to fill in required information.  In this respect the research process was both analogue and mechanical.  It was also by today’s standards incredibly time consuming.

My ever-expanding ‘data base’ was made up of multiple filing cards and bulging ring binders.  They embraced just about every writer in Britain who ever visited Fascist Italy or commented from afar on the virtues or otherwise of Signor Mussolini.  DH Lawrence of course had a great deal to say about dictatorship Italian-style, as did Bertrand Russell, HG Wells and Wyndham Lewis.  Someone else fascinated by Italy was Aldous Huxley, his early novels a revelation.  Harold Nicolson’s real-time record of visiting Rome with ‘Tom’ Mosley was pure Peaky Blinders.  In my head a structure had emerged, and by late spring 1974 the time was right to put pen to paper.

Chapter by chapter I wrote and finetuned a first draft, before creating a second draft of the whole thesis on my portable typewriter.  I amended my manuscript by hand, endeavouring to maintain a legible final version.  Graham Thomas corrected and commented where appropriate, and on instruction I added further scribblings – and that was it.  Faculty secretaries moonlighted as thesis typists, and within weeks I had in my hands a scarcely unrecognisable final text: a top copy and two carbons, with all corrections neatly Typexed.  With no on-campus binding service students were directed to a Victorian printshop just outside Canterbury.  Today’s bound theses are compact and well presented, but my MA looks enormous.  Given a minimum number of words (twenty-five thousand) but no upper limit, I wrote forty thousand.  The font was Garamond twelve-point and the spacing multiple, but one-third of every page was left blank for the insertion of footnotes.  My carbon copy isn’t paginated and I haven’t counted, but there are a lot of pages!

Roderick Kedward, authority on Occupied France and writer of a much-praised undergraduate guide to mid-century fascism, had agreed to act as external examiner.  There was no viva.  Presumably there was an examiners’ report, but I never saw it.  All I got was a short official letter confirming the award of an MA and inviting me to the next graduation ceremony.  Years later I met Rod Kedward, who sadly died this April.  He was very friendly, but freely confessed to having no recollection of reading my thesis.  I wasn’t offended of course – year on year snowed under with marking why would he remember my ambitious effort to take on George Orwell?

The pandemic meant much of my last book was researched and written at home.  As always, I was amazed by how much information was available via the internet.  Digital technology and speed of communication facilitates a breadth and depth of research, and a speed of completion, inconceivable in the 1970s.  Looking back across the past thirty years, it is striking how quickly the academic community took all of this for granted.  There are now of course numerous researchers who have known no other environment.  Yet, notwithstanding the arrival of word processing, the quotidian experience of scholarly inquiry – of historical investigation – up until the mid-1990s was not that different from when I began my MA.  The digital transformation when it occurred was astonishingly fast, but before that change was incremental.  What did occur was the assumption that all history postgraduates should be familiar with relevant archives, and that formal monitoring of progress and performance was in the interest of both institution and student (on this key aspect of quality assurance did CNAA-regulated polytechnics lead the way?).  Left alone for twelve months to sink or swim, my MA year saw a quantum leap in knowledge and maturity.  I gained a greater degree of self-assurance and of self-awareness, plus a degree; all this and a lot of fun.  Ironically, the reasons why I enjoyed myself were the same reasons as to why the system had to change.

A family friend, Simone Guyonvarch, lives part of the year in Sutton and part of the year on the Quiberon peninsula.  Her father, like many mariners from southern Brittany, served in the Free French Navy during the Second World War.  Postwar he stayed in the Navy, serving as a ship’s carpenter and literally sailing around the world on board the aircraft carrier Dixmunde (formerly the escort carrier HMS Biter).  Simone kindly lent me a folder of  fascinating documents covering her dad’s time in the FNFL, as well as a copy of Thierry d’Argenlieu’s wartime memoirs, Souvenirs de Guerre.  Photographs in the folder showed General de Gaulle and Amiral d’Argenlieu inspecting M. Guyonvarch’s chasseur, moored on the Isle of Wight’s River Medina.  We all know who Charles de Gaulle was, but who was Thierry d’Argenlieu?  Last winter I wrote a 2000 word magazine piece on the Free French’s sailor priest; but History Today said no and BBC History never got back to me, hence its appearance here:

Sea-going priests with ships in their sights are hard to find, but not in France.  Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu was a key player within the Free French, the political and military coalition that rallied around General de Gaulle following the fall of France in June 1940.  That summer he co-founded Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres [FNFL], the Free French Navy.  Mariner, priest and political animal, Father d’Argenlieu rose from lieutenant to admiral in seven years, the strength of his religious faith matched only by the depth of his loyalty to Charles de Gaulle.

Born into a Breton family with a long naval tradition, d’Argenlieu became an officer in the Marine Nationale, the French Navy.  His achievements before and during the First World War earned him the Légion d’Honneur.  A devout Catholic, d’Argenlieu joined the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, before transferring to the naval reserve and studying for the priesthood.  Within ten years of ordination Père Louis de la Trinité was the Carmelites’ Prior Provincial in Paris.

In September 1939 Lieutenant d’Argenlieu returned to active service.  Ten months later he was helping organise the defence of Cherbourg when ordered to cease fighting.  D’Argenlieu was appalled by news of the armistice and vowed to fight on.  As a prisoner-of-war he escaped from a German truck and secured passage to Jersey.  The last ship out of St Helier brought him to England.  In London he bonded immediately with de Gaulle, and the fledgling Free French gained the service of an able administrator.  A somewhat cold and ascetic character, d’Argenlieu would prove a competent if unbending emissary and, surprisingly, a first-class propagandist.

De Gaulle always had a healthy respect for high-flying prelates, and from the outset he and d’Argenlieu got on well.  Neither man felt the same affection towards Vice-Admiral Muselier.  Both a sailor and a politician, Émile Muselier’s rackety past included several clashes with Admiral François Darlan, the Chief of the Naval Staff.  It was a deep loathing of Darlan as much as de Gaulle’s famous broadcast of 11 June that brought him to London.  In August 1940 Muselier promoted d’Argenlieu to capitaine de frégate.  Together with a young officer called Voisin they created the Free French Navy.

Three destroyers and five submarines – including the huge Surcouf – had been seized by the Royal Navy and handed over to the Free French.  An assortment of small ships fleeing France created a combined force of around thirty vessels.  In due course the Admiralty added corvettes for convoy duty and power boats for coastal patrol.

Appointed the new navy’s chaplain, d’Argenlieu visited camps full of sailors fresh from the Norway campaign and keen to get home.   He urged his fellow countrymen to stay and fight with the Free French, but few felt inspired by de Gaulle’s message of resistance.  Accepting the legitimacy of Marshal Petain’s administration, the majority obeyed Darlan’s order to cease fighting.  Not to do so was seen in Vichy, the seat of government, as an act of treason.  In due course a court martial sentenced the absent d’Argenlieu to death.

Most regular officers in the Marine Nationale were Catholic, conservative, anti-republican and instinctively anti-semitic.  They were soon seen by the Germans as valued collaborators in the administration of occupied France.  The Vichy government was similarly trusting, especially in 1940-42 when Darlan served as Petain’s deputy.  Joint operations with the Royal Navy had done little to counter a historic distrust of the British, especially after French ships were seized or interned.

Muted anger turned to open fury when on 3 July 1940 Admiral Somerville’s Force H attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. Although some ships fled the Algerian port for Toulon, several others were sunk or severely damaged.  Nearly 1300 officers and men died.  The attack raised morale in London, and sent a powerful message to Washington, but it alienated French public opinion and boosted the popularity of Petain’s regime.  Anglophobia was now a powerful propagandist force in France.

The losses at Mers-el-Kébir severely tested Muselier and his fellow officers’ support for de Gaulle’s pro-British strategy.  Britain’s sinking of French ships, by no means for the last time, made recruitment that much more difficult.  Nevertheless, fishermen from Normandy and Brittany risked crossing the Channel to join Les Forces Navales Françaises Libres.  The FNFL based itself in Cowes, with a headquarters and training depot across the Solent at Emsworth.  This was still a tiny force and yet Free French propaganda created the image of a mass movement: a widely circulated photograph of sailors marching through London on Bastille Day 1940 made the entire complement seem a fraction of a far greater force.

D’Argenlieu accompanied de Gaulle on the disastrous expedition to French West Africa in September 1940.  The capture of Dakar would be a major strategic gain, but ships and ground forces loyal to Vichy resisted all efforts by the Royal Navy taskforce to seize control and enter the port.  A mixture of force and persuasion proved disastrous for the Free French, and d’Argenlieu sustained a nasty leg wound.  The failure of the operation severely dented de Gaulle’s standing in London.  A handful of Free French naval officers had found themselves on the side of their former comrades’ enemy in a fiercely conducted naval encounter – for all intents and purposes Britain was now fighting France.

De facto war was confirmed in subsequent Royal Navy and Free French operations to consolidate or secure control of other French colonies south of the Sahel and stretching deep into the interior.  De Gaulle’s credibility had been partially restored, and in Marie-Pierre Koenig and Philippe Leclerc the Free French had found their fighting generals: one the hero of Bir Hakeim in June 1942, the other the liberator of Paris in August 1944.  The West Africa campaign had seen d’Argenlieu directly involved in fighting between his embryonic navy and ships of the Marine Nationale.  This naturally enhanced his standing with de Gaulle, and it wasn’t long before he was promoted to contre-amiral.

D’Argenlieu’s fierce loyalty to his master saw him entrusted with sensitive missions, most notably as High Commissioner of the Pacific Territories in 1941-42.  More Gaullist than de Gaulle, his readiness to thwart American intentions in New Caledonia cemented the Roosevelt administration’s suspicion of the Free French.  Equally infuriating for the White House was Muselier’s success in seizing St Pierre et Miquelon, France’s only territory in North America.

Although unbending as a diplomat, d’Argenlieu was always a keen networker.  Back in London he charmed useful contacts like Lord Mountbatten, the one chief of staff with a kind word for de Gaulle.  The two men would meet again in postwar Saigon, with d’Argenlieu deaf to Mountbatten’s message of compromise.

In August 1943 d’Argenlieu took command of the renamed Les Forces Navales en Grande-Bretagne.  This kept him away from old enemies stationed in North Africa who had switched sides once the Allies were in full control: commanding the new Naval HQ in Algiers was André Lemonnier, the cruiser captain who had seen off d’Argenlieu and his Royal Navy allies in September 1940.  All elements of the Marine Nationale outside Metropolitan France were now merged with the men and ships of the FNFL.  Only 6000 of the 42,000 personnel were Free French, bringing with them around eighty vessels.  Their flagship was the battleship Richelieu, its crew having switched sides after the Germans occupied all of France in November 1942.  The Richelieu and the other state-of-the-art ships previously holed up in Dakar constituted the core of France’s renewed credentials as a maritime force.  The new navy relied heavily on the British and the Americans compensating for French ships previously sunk or scuttled: London and Washington authorised a small but significant transfer of destroyers, frigates and the odd submarine.

Fusing the rival navies was made that much easier by Darlan’s assassination in Algiers at the end of 1942.  The Marine Nationale’s commander in chief had been an arch collaborationist.  Yet, ironically, before he died Darlan fulfilled his pledge that the Toulon fleet would be scuttled to prevent the Germans seizing it – in July 1940 Churchill had dismissed that promise, hence the attack at Mers-el-Kébir.

Darlan had done a deal with the Americans, as had General Henri Giraud, the Allies’ choice of military commander in Algiers.  It became increasingly clear that Giraud had no power base in North Africa let alone within France, so once more de Gaulle was back in the ascendancy.  Muselier was tarnished by his close association with Giraud, to the obvious advantage of d’Argenlieu.

Unsurprisingly, when de Gaulle crossed to France on 14 July 1944 d’Argenlieu joined him on the destroyer La Combattante: seven months later the former HMS Haldon would sink after hitting a mine off Hull.  Free French ships had an unenviable record of avoidable mishaps, but d’Argenlieu spent little time inquiring into why this should be – he was focused on higher matters, both spiritual and secular.  Naturally he walked beside de Gaulle on his famous walk to Notre Dame on 25 August 1944.

After the Liberation the heroes of 1940-41 feared they would be forgotten, but not in the Bulletin de la Marine Française.  The magazine dedicated frequent photo shoots to d’Argenlieu, giving Lemonnier minimal coverage.  The June 1944 issue applauded d’Argenlieu’s success creating rest and recreation centres in London and Cowes, while August’s Bulletin highlighted an emotional return to Cherbourg.  Fittingly, the farewell issue saluted the ships and sailors of the FNFL as they were in mid-1943 prior to merging with their former Vichy foes.

The summer of 1945 saw the soon to be Admiral d’Argenlieu appointed as Governor General in Indo-China.  His inflexibility over the following eighteen months would see the Viet Minh commence a nine-year war to end French rule.  Leclerc led an expeditionary force in a ruthless counterinsurgency operation, and yet increasingly he saw the need to negotiate.  He failed to convince d’Argenlieu that this was an unwinnable campaign, the two men having loathed each other since their first meeting in London five years before.

The advent of the Fourth Republic saw de Gaulle out of power, and d’Argenlieu was soon back with the Carmelites.  He served the order faithfully until his death in 1965, but remained Chancellor of the Ordre de la Libération, the honour created by de Gaulle in November 1940 to reward the staunchest of his supporters.  Most elevated among the order’s thousand or so companions were those who had founded the Free French at the very moment of national humiliation.  These were the loyalist of the loyal, with whom d’Argenlieu worked relentlessly to forge a powerful and enduring myth of national resistance.  When de Gaulle returned to office in May 1958 d’Argenlieu quietly celebrated the creation of the Fifth Republic.  Unlike other veteran Gaullists he stayed silent over the decision to quit Algeria.  Thierry d’Argenlieu was by now a largely forgotten figure, other than in the presidential office where his portrait took pride of place.

Naval officers like d’Argenlieu who rallied to de Gaulle were Catholic, conservative, and often monarchist; but their dislike of the Third Republic never extended to virulent anti-semitism and a readiness to place ideology above patriotism.  Appalled by the notion of surrender, let alone collaboration, they fought alongside the British even when their emotions as loyal Frenchmen were sorely tested.  De Gaulle’s broad alliance embraced radicals and socialists – even at times Communists – but those he trusted most were men from the same mould as himself.  This is what so infuriated Petain and all those intent on an anti-republican counter-revolution in France: why in God’s name was a senior Carmelite at the head of a navy dependent on the goodwill of their oldest enemy?

D’Argenlieu had the last laugh, his closeness to de Gaulle ensuring power and influence even after the uneasy fusion of Free French and Vichy naval forces.  Other Free French veterans had more painful experiences.  Yet all of them could reflect on the desperate days of 1940 and know that with the passage of time their refusal to surrender would be duly vindicated and universally honoured.

Download SDv3.8.0 here. This release includes:

• Compatibility with Mathematica version 13.1.
  • i.e. conflict between the SpinDynamica BlockDiagonalMatrix symbol and the Mathematica symbol of the same name has been resolved
• Compatibility with Mathematica version 13.0 remains.
• Bug fixes
  • See new documentation part 12 for: AbelianSubalgebra[], InaccessibleOperatorQ[]

I wrote a short book about for Bloomsbury Music’s 331/3 series on individual artists and albums, but things didn’t work out and it’s now been published by Takahe, the small outfit in Coventry run by Steve Hodder.  It was Takahe which in 2020 published Slouching Towards Big Pink – essays on Bob Dylan and The Band, Woody Guthrie, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The new book is about the great English songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson, who read it in manuscript and corrected the odd factual error – he’s going to plug the book on his Facebook page. Here’s how to purchase a copy, with the blurb from the back cover replicated below:

Adrian Smith, FLYING SOLO: RICHARD THOMPSON AND THE MAKING OF HENRY THE HUMAN FLY  (Takahe Publishing, 2023)  £10.95

Available from the publisher: Publications (takahepublishing.co.uk)

Available from Amazon: Flying Solo: Richard Thompson and the Making of Henry The Human Fly: Amazon.co.uk: Smith, Adrian: 9781908837295: Books

Richard Thompson’s vision, originality and technical prowess marks him out as a songwriter and guitarist of remarkable endurance, as inventive and relevant today as at the outset of his solo career half a century ago.  In Flying Solo: Richard Thompson and the Making of Henry The Human Fly Adrian Smith explains why a debut album dismissed at the time as eccentric and disappointing came to be seen as strikingly original, its preoccupation with the strange and subversive anticipating contemporary songwriters and naturalists like Jonny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane.  Flying Solo traces Henry The Human Fly’s impressive afterlife back to Richard Thompson’s formative years with Fairport Convention and his determination to echo The Band by making music that transcended time, fusing native myths and folk traditions with modern day arrangements, instrumentation and production.

Henry The Human Fly is seen as a bridge between folk rock’s finest hour – Fairport’s Liege & Lief – and the much acclaimed I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, the first and the best of Richard and Linda Thompson’s six albums.  The couple’s break up saw Thompson relocate to America and establish himself as an artist in his own right on both sides of the Atlantic.  A succession of outstanding albums meant that for too long Henry The Human Fly was overlooked; rediscovery thanks to streaming means we can now locate it as an important milestone in the long career of a truly great talent.

Professor Mark Cragg from the Centre for Cancer Immunology is part of a review of recent discoveries on how antibodies work in our bodies.

In particular, the paper published in Nature Immunology, discusses how antibodies change in our bodies during aging, pregnancy and different diseases, including cancer, in regards to how long they stay in the blood, which other molecules in the immune system they interact with and how well they destroy pathogens”

The authors, which include Professors Falk Nimmerjahn and Gestur Vidarsson who are based in Germany and Amsterdam respectively, discuss how these changes affect the antibody function.

They go on to discuss how we can learn from these findings, provided by Nature to improve our design of therapeutic antibodies for various clinical indications.

A scientist at the Centre for Cancer Immunology has been involved in a study that shows, for the first time, the real-world vaccine responses and infection outcomes in clinically at-risk patients with a range of immunocompromised or immunosuppressed conditions.

Preliminary data from the landmark OCTAVE study in August 2021 showed that a significant proportion of clinically at-risk patients with immunocompromised or immunosuppressed conditions, mounted a low, or undetectable, immune response after two doses of the same SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Now, in new peer-reviewed data, researchers are able to share the real-world infection outcomes for this clinically at-risk group.

Published in Nature Medicine, the latest findings reveal that while in most at-risk patient groups the overall COVID-19 infection rates were low, the risk of severity and death from SARS-CoV-2 was high in a sub-group of conditions, despite vaccination. This was particularly the case during the Delta wave. Furthermore, the data show that while Omicron, now the dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain worldwide, saw a rise of infection rate among at-risk patients, fewer of them became severely unwell or died.

This data covers the time from 2021 to mid-2022, and include patients infected with the alpha, delta and omicron strains of SARS-CoV-2. The data do not estimate the impact of third and fourth vaccinations, which have since been offered to patients in the groups studied.

The OCTAVE findings in detail:

• There were 20 hospital sites across the UK who enrolled 2686 patients with reduced function of their immune systems to the trial.
• Overall, 474 patients in the study became ill with COVID-19 up to one year after the date of their first vaccination. 111 of these infections were identified as either Alpha (1) or Delta (110) variants and 336 were identified as Omicron. 48 people were admitted to hospital because of a COVID-19 infection and sadly, 15 people died from the disease.
• Most infections (76%) occurred more than six months after the second vaccination and were in patients with a kidney transplant, inflammatory arthritis and Crohn’s Disease. The majority of these infections were also first-time SARS-CoV-2 infections. Infections occurring within six months of the second vaccination were not more severe than those reported six months or longer post second vaccination.
• Most infections (90%) were mild in severity, including some asymptomatic cases. Severe cases requiring hospitalisation or death was reported in 9.8% of infections and occurred predominantly in patients with renal disease. Patients infected in the Delta wave were more likely to have serious infection than those infected in the Omicron wave.
• In patients who did not mount a successful immune response to two COVID-19 vaccinations, the rate of infection was higher when compared to those in the study that did mount an immune response after vaccination.
• In some disease groups, the overall infection rates were low – possibly because of continued shielding at the time – but the proportion of severe cases within these groups were high. This was most notable in patients with ANCA Associated Vasculitis on rituximab, auto and allogeneic stem cell transplant and CART-T cell treated patients.
• Low rates of severe disease were reported in patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Dr Sean Lim, Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant in Haematological Oncology at the University of Southampton, said: “While COVID seems like a memory for some of us, for many patients will compromised immune systems, the threat is still very real. Studies like OCTAVE provide us with important data and insight into how vaccines have provided protection for vulnerable people and how the variants impacted how effective they were. Importantly it’s shown us which patients, including some with renal diseases and some inflammatory conditions, who were not adequately protected, which will help us plan for the future. I’m very pleased we have been part of this important study, which is one of the largest studies in the world so far into post-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in immunocompromised patients.”

OCTAVE (Observational Cohort Trial-T-cells Antibodies and Vaccine Efficacy in SARS-CoV-2) is a multi-centre, UK-wide trial led by the University of Glasgow, co-ordinated by the University of Birmingham’s Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit and delivered by a national consortium of leading academic and clinical centres.

It was set up in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to evaluate, in real time, the immune responses following COVID-19 vaccination in patients with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases such as cancer, inflammatory arthritis, diseases of the kidney or liver, or patients who are having a stem cell transplant.

According to the Met Office last month’s mean temperature of 14.9 celsius makes it the hottest June since 1940.  A marked feature about weather patterns in the 1940s is the harshness of the winters across Europe, as the German Army found to its cost in Russia from late 1941.  For the British it’s a postwar winter that is etched into the national psyche, with the ice and snow lasting well into the ostensible spring (with extensive flooding once the big melt began).  The morale of the British Expeditionary Force in northern France during the winter of 1939-40 must surely have been affected by the freezing weather – visits from Gracie Fields and George Formby provided a brief distraction from the cold, but by the time spring arrived life in and behind the defensive positions must have been pretty miserable – and then the Germans made it a whole lot worse.  The decade’s best known June is of course 1944, but that was a month marred by bad weather: The 6th marked a brief if fortuitous break in the storms lashing the Channel (Ike: ‘Let’s go!’), while continuous bad weather from the 19th to the 21st June left the Mulberry A Harbour at Omaha Beach so badly damaged that the caissons were beyond repair.  Four years earlier the evacuation of over 338,000 troops from Dunkirk was over by 6th June (it effectively ended two days earlier), but the good weather stretched back into May, ensuring calmness in the Channel for long periods of time.  There was a consistent warmth across 24 hours but without the extremes seen in June 2023, and without long periods of clear blue sky.  The absence of the latter was crucial as low cloud cover went some way to reducing the impact of the Luftwaffe strafing the packed beaches.  Some have argued that the light breeze also ensured a degree of smoke cover from aerial attack, but I suspect the jury is out on that one.  Of course extensive fighting continued post-Dunkirk, and again good weather must have been a key factor in the relative success of subsequent evacuations further south (the loss of the Lancastria and the surrender of the 51st (Highland) Division heavily qualifying any claim that such operations could be seen as successful).  Of course the Germans also benefited from good weather in their offensive preparations, but long days of sunny skies were hugely beneficial to both the Army and the Royal Navy in preparing for an anticipated invasion.  For the RAF pilot and air crew training benefited hugely from an exceptionally fine June, as did operational squadrons in 11 and 12 Groups, already in fierce combat over the Channel ahead of the Battle of Britain (for which the starting date is usually given as 10th July 1940).  Fighter Command further benefited from a warm and sunny spring in that aircraft production continued round the clock – Spitfire production at Supermarine’s Woolston works in Southampton reached its optimum output prior to the catastrophic air raids on 23rd August and 15th September 1940.  American reporters in England that spring and early summer were astonished by the plethora of cricket matches still being played, and many a returned member of the BEF had a few choice words to say about the presence of so many dressed in whites not khaki; but the sun shone and the wickets were dry – it’s hard to imagine Ben Stokes not taking the opportunity to knock off a quick 155.  Thinking of England’s talisman, if you were on the beach at Dunkirk queuing for days to reach the mole who would you want as your company commander, keeping up morale and insistent that he’ll get you home come hell or high water?

Clinician scientists based at the Centre for Cancer Immunology have shown a rare form of cancer can be treated with a drug that’s already available on the NHS.

Hairy Cell Leukaemia (HCL) is a chronic leukaemia and gets its name from the tiny, hair-like projections on the cell’s surface. Current treatment is usually chemotherapy which has many side effects and does not eradicate the disease completely.

Professor Francesco Forconi, professor of Haematology at the University of Southampton and haematologist at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation trust, observed that HCL have mechanisms, making the hairy cells unable die, but can specifically be targeted by Venetoclax, a drug already used to treat other blood cancers and has fewer side effects. He has treated the first HCL patient with this drug.

Professor Forconi hopes the case, which has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) will open conversations between the pharma industry, clinicians and clinical trial specialists and lead to more studies in HCL patients.

David Halford, from Southampton, was diagnosed with HCL in 2007 after he felt unwell. “I thought I had a chest infection,” he said. “But has soon as the doctor saw me, he sent me straight to hospital. I was shocked when they told me it was cancer. I just wanted to go home, but they wouldn’t let me. I had to have an immediate blood transfusion before starting the chemotherapy. I just kept thinking ‘how long have I got?’ It was so scary.”

David had several rounds of chemotherapy which put the disease under control for some time but had a lot of side effects including sickness and extreme fatigue. He had to have six months off being a postman, a job he loves and has now done for 29 years.

In 2018 however, David began to feel unwell again and scans revealed the cancer had returned. This time, David did not want chemotherapy and Professor Forconi proposed Venetoclax.

He explained: “Patients with HCL are usually treated with a type of chemotherapy called purine analogues, but it can be toxic and does not eradicate the disease completely. Patients can also benefit from specific inhibitors of BRAF, a protein that helps HCL cells grow. However, these are not available on the NHS and even when they are used, again they do not kill the disease completely.

“Venetoclax works by blocking another protein in HCL called Bcl2, which protects the cancer cells from being destroyed. Venetoclax stops Bcl2 from working and kills the cells. Importantly, it does this with very little side effects for the patient. We were thrilled to see it work so well in David.”

After just five weeks of taking Venetoclax in tablet form, David was feeling much better, and amazingly tests showed he was in remission, which meant he could go back to his post rounds.

“I couldn’t believe it,” David said. “I thought I would have to have another six months off work, but it was absolutely amazing to be back after five weeks. The experience was completely different to the treatment before. I hardly experienced any side effects. The treatment was brilliant as were all the medical staff at the hospital. They are wonderful people who work so hard.”

The University of Southampton is an international centre of excellence for HCL. Together with Ohio State University and Royal Marsden Hospital, Southampton researchers are developing a registry on HCL to enable researchers to study HCL in ways not previously possible given the rarity of the disease. The registry will collect patient data and help researchers identify new trends in patient outcomes, discover previously unknown complications of the disease, and design clinical trials for new therapies until a cure is discovered.

Professor Forconi added: “David was an excellent example of showing how we can use other drugs to treat rare diseases. I hope that our ongoing conversations between pharma and clinicians will lead to meaningful plans to do more research and clinical trials into how we can help people with this rare form of cancer.”

Scientists and researchers from the Centre for Cancer Immunology have been presenting their work at several conferences across the globe over the past few weeks.

Professors Peter Johnson and Sean Lim attended the Lugano International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma. Professor Johnson delivered the prestigious John Ultmann Memorial Lecture detailing 25 years of Antibodies in Lymphoma. Professor Lim took part in the conference’s poster session to explain the RiVa trial, which is helping us understand how combining immmunotherapy drugs could help to tackle treatment resistance in B cell lymphoma.

Professors Steve Beers, Mark Cragg and Sally Ward recently attended the European Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics conference in Amsterdam where they presented research, chaired sessions and took part in round table discussions.

Professor Gareth Griffiths, Director of the Southampton Clinical Trials Unit, which is based at the Centre presents the NERO trial at the ‘Trials in Progress’ poster session at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in June. NERO is testing whether a targeted cancer treatment could improve survival for people with mesothelioma. Additionally, Sean Ewings, Associate Professor of Medical Statistics presented his work at the Society for Clinical Trials conference in May.

PhD student Josie Buckingham attended the European Association for Cancer Research to present her work developing a vaccine to target Cancer Associated Fibroblasts in head and neck cancer; while work between the Centre and the Ruotolo Research Group at the University of Michigan that is using Ion mobility-mass spectrometry to better understand the structure of Human IgG2 antibodies was also presented at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry meeting in Houston, Texas.

Our teams have also got presentations coming up over the summer months. For example,

Jemma Longley, CRUK Academic Clinical Researcher in Cancer Immunology, will be presenting at the Annual Clinical Fellows meeting at the CRICK in London, while Denise Boulanger, Senior Research Fellow, will be presenting a joined seminar with her colleague Andy Van Hateren at the University of Edinburgh.

Sonia Gabriela Murillo Barrera will give a poster presentation entitled Discovery of therapeutic targets in Peripheral T Cell Lymphoma at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/European Conference on Computational Biology conference in Lyon, France.

*photo of Professor Gareth Griffiths at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. Credit: Southampton Clinical Trials Unit.

David Campbell Bannerman has been in the news a great deal recently as a cheer leader for Boris Johnson.  He is chair of the self-styled Conservative Democratic Organisation, a body loud in its criticism of Rishi Sunak’s premiership and its insistence that Johnson is innocent of all findings of the Commons’ Privileges Committee. Campbell Bannerman’s chequered political career has been built around a deep loathing of Brussels and enthusiastic support for chancers like Farage and Johnson.  In the heady days of UKIP he defected from the Conservative Party, only to rejoin post-Brexit.  As a parliamentary candidate he’s a serial loser from whom Sir Keir Starmer has nothing to learn when it comes to planning and implementing an electoral strategy.  The same, however, can’t be said of an earlier member of the Campbell Bannerman family, as I suggested in a piece which appeared on the New Statesman website last autumn and remains topical:

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman led the Liberals to stunning success in the 1906 general election and a majority of 125 in the Commons: six years after a catastrophic election result the Liberals gained 216 seats, including that of former prime minister Arthur Balfour.  It would be nine years before the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies returned to government and seventeen years before they again ruled alone. Like Clem Attlee in 1945, ‘C.B.’ was singularly lacking in charisma, and yet he engineered a historic victory for his party.  Keir Starmer points to Attlee, and to a lesser extent Wilson and Blair, as his role models.  Yet he could learn a lot from Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s success in reuniting his party, silencing dismissive criticism on both sides of the House, and creating what in due course would prove one of the great reforming administrations.

Starmer’s reputation for competence rests on his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions, and within Whitehall Campbell-Bannerman was similarly seen as an instinctive reformer and an able administrator.  The four decades preceding the First World War saw the question of Home Rule for Ireland prove every bit as divisive as Brexit.  Prior to the 1906 election Campbell-Bannerman neutralised Irish Home Rule in the same way that Starmer steers clear of detailed debate over the UK and Northern Ireland’s future relationship with the EU.  The Liberals’ political enemies were starved of ammunition, in the same way that hard line Brexiteers are denied tangible evidence of Labour seeking a rapprochement with Brussels over current trading relations.  Although Campbell-Bannerman left Ireland on hold, he recognised the advantage a large parliamentary majority gave him in exploiting a demoralised opposition.  The newly elected Liberal Government swiftly seized the initiative, pushing through a raft of welfare and foreign policy reforms.  At home, trade union and employment rights were extended, building regulations were strengthened, and the penal system reformed to separate young offenders from adult criminals.  While short-sightedly the question of votes for women was still off the agenda, ‘New Liberal’ plans for old age pensions and national insurance were well advanced when terminal illness forced Campbell-Bannerman to resign in April 1908.  Overseas success included formation of the Union of South Africa, détente with Russia and a deepening of the Entente Cordiale.  Admittedly, C.B.’s vision of Britain’s future relations with France and the Tsar was very different from that of his Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey – Campbell-Bannerman was almost certainly kept in the dark about plans for military collaboration, although he more than held his own in talks with Clemenceau, another radical prime minister: a Francophile and a free trader, Sir Henry prioritised Britain’s prominence in European power politics over the extension or consolidation of its already overstretched empire.   A priority for Labour in its honeymoon period – whether ruling alone or supported by the Liberal Democrats – must be to restore membership of the single market, or to secure an equivalent status.

The Liberals’ electoral strategy embraced a progressive alliance with the then Labour Representation Committee.  In January 1906 the pact bore fruit, ensuring the future Labour Party a foothold in the House of Commons.  Few anticipate Labour candidates standing down for Liberal Democrats, and vice versa, but Sir Keir can learn from Campbell-Bannerman the value of talking to your natural allies.

Above all, Starmer should embrace Campbell-Bannerman’s systematic exploitation of a demoralised government’s bitter infighting.  By 1905 Balfour’s administration was riven by factionalism, his Tory-dominated coalition split over Joseph Chamberlain’s Empire-based vision of protectionism, Tariff Reform.  For eighteen months prior to polling day the Liberals ruthlessly publicised their opponents’ divisions, portraying Tariff Reform as a direct threat to the material well-being of families already hard hit by rising prices and deepening inequality.  Party strategists identified a select number of salient issues, all seen as illustrative of government incompetence and inertia, and all portrayed as evidence of the need for fundamental change.

In the 1906 campaign Liberal propaganda was simple, easy to comprehend and devastatingly effective.  By then Campbell-Bannerman had one big advantage over Starmer, in that he was already in office.  When Balfour’s cabinet imploded in late 1905 the Liberal leader had ignored the reservations of his party’s big beasts and accepted the King’s invitation to form a minority government.  Come the new year he went to the country.  Campbell-Bannerman had a keen sense of timing, shrewdly managing risk and sensing exactly when to seize an opportunity.  Keir Starmer needs to hone these qualities and be ready to run with fresh ideas as they become available.  The release of Gordon Brown’s constitutional review will be one such moment.  As a keen advocate of parliamentary reform Sir Henry would be the first to embrace an ambitious blueprint for reshaping a malfunctioning British state.

Campbell-Bannerman secured an astonishing reversal of fortune for his party within a single parliament.  An Edwardian politician may not be Sir Keir’s default choice for inspiration, and yet Sir Henry’s credentials as a role model remain unexpectedly relevant in an era no less turbulent and polarised than his own.

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945-79 and the paperback edition of its prequel, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord were both published at the tail end of last year.  There was so much that I couldn’t include in the second volume, including the following:

On the first weekend in June 1979 Earl Mountbatten of Burma had no idea his life would end with sudden and brutal ferocity only two months later.  A headline in that week’s issue of the Economist surely caught his eye: ‘Britain’s decline; its causes and consequences.’  It was a leaked valedictory despatch, drafted at the start of the year by the retiring Ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Henderson.  Labour’s Foreign Secretary, David Owen, chose not to circulate Henderson’s highly unorthodox farewell letter.  However, the election of a new government saw the document enthusiastically embraced by Tory free-marketeers intent on radical change, most notably the Industry Secretary Sir Keith Joseph.  Whitehall officials fretted over Fleet Street rumours of a decidedly undiplomatic commentary on Britain’s place in the world as seen from the perspective of 35 Rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré.  Once it was known the Economist had a copy of Henderson’s despatch the editor Andrew Knight rejected a Foreign Office request to withhold publication.  Yet the absence of ministerial protest was striking, nowhere more so than in Downing Street.  This surely was the moment when Mrs Thatcher first conceived the idea of inviting Sir Nicholas to succeed Peter Jay as the British Ambassador in Washington.  It proved a brilliant appointment, confirming a distinguished and eventful career to be anything but over.  Mountbatten always maintained he was more of a New Statesman man, but the aperçus of Amis, Barnes and Hitchens could scarcely compete with Henderson’s incendiary prose.  Here, the Economist declared, was a document ‘so unusually forthright and timely, particularly in its middle and concluding passages on British policy in Europe, under governments of every stripe,’ that full disclosure was a public duty.

Nicko Henderson and Dickie Mountbatten, despite a twenty-year age difference, had more in common than a debonair swagger, a purposeful step in the corridors of power, a disarming presence in the salon and the gun room, an abundance of charm and a good tailor.  By 1979 they would have been well acquainted, having probably met for the first time at the Potsdam conference where Henderson was acting as Anthony Eden’s assistant private secretary and Mountbatten was learning that the war with Japan would soon be over: unanticipated electoral defeat saw the Foreign Secretary and his staff head for home, while the Supreme Commander South-East Asia planned for imminent surrender and a new world order.  Mountbatten easily adjusted to his new political masters, as did Henderson, who soon found himself working for Eden’s successor, Ernie Bevin.  A year later Mountbatten resumed his naval career, while Henderson regularised his position by belatedly joining the Diplomatic Service.  By the early ’sixties Mountbatten was Chief of the Defence Staff, while Henderson, on the cusp of ambassadorial appointments in Warsaw, Bonn and Paris, was riding high inside the Foreign Office.  The two men shared the same working environment, and – as confirmed in June 1979 – they shared similar views on Britain’s global standing at the height of the Cold War: the qualified success of an Atlanticist foreign policy and an accelerated withdrawal from empire, but a demonstrable failure to acknowledge and accommodate an all too obvious dilution of power.

Nowhere had that failure been more evident than during the Suez crisis in 1956, when Mountbatten as First Sea Lord had offered Eden his resignation while at the same time ensuring the Royal Navy was fully prepared for a military operation to reclaim the Canal Zone.  Similarly, Mountbatten had been the driving force behind Polaris, the United Kingdom’s submarine-based second-generation deterrence force; while at the same time bemoaning nuclear proliferation and questioning the fundamental principles that underpinned NATO’s nuclear strategy.

Henderson summarised how the United Kingdom was seen by its continental partners and trading rivals three decades on from western Europe’s first hesitant steps towards reconstruction and revival.  His evidence-based indictment of strategic misthinking and economic mismanagement was rooted in comparative data, and an insider’s knowledge of how successive governments had reacted to the speed of recovery in West Germany and the transformation in French manufacturing industry.  A failure to recognise the speed and significance of European integration until far too late, and a reluctance or inability to emulate the Fourth Republic in its promotion of macro-economic planning, constituted a serious underestimation of French ambition and strategic vision.  France’s colonial travails and political instability masked a process of modernisation, urbanisation and accelerated growth: for all the drama of de Gaulle’s return to power and the consequent creation of a Fifth Republic, his insistence that France be able to stand alone built upon a prevailing post-Suez determination to end any dependence on American goodwill.

Fluent in the language and well connected within the French political and military elite, Mountbatten had observed a stark contrast across the Channel from the Macmillan Government’s urgent endeavour to rebuild the ‘special relationship’ and to tap into American nuclear technology.  He of course was at the heart of those efforts to re-establish and exploit longstanding trans-Atlantic personal and institutional relationships.  A scion of the German aristocracy, Mountbatten maintained close family ties inside the Federal Republic, consolidated from the mid-fifties by high-level NATO connections.  Henderson’s Rhine posting gave him a birds-eye view of the Christian Democrats’ wirtschaftswunder at its height, but Mountbatten enjoyed an insider’s perspective on Adenauer’s insistence that West Germany’s geopolitical rehabilitation demanded a firm industrial and commercial foundation.

A communications specialist and a wartime patron of operational research, Mountbatten’s honorary fellowship of the Royal Society recognised an active engagement with applied science and engineering.  He bemoaned an erosion of global influence, blaming government, the City and manufacturers for a failure to prioritise capital investment and innovation other than in the defence sector.  Fostering high-tech enterprise was a passion before, and most especially after, Mountbatten’s retirement as CDS in July 1965.  As founder of the National Electronics Research Council and a pioneer of subscription TV, he energetically lobbied the fledgling Ministry of Technology, his abrasive and vainglorious efforts singularly failing to impress Tony Benn.  Like Henderson, Mountbatten saw the United Kingdom lagging ever further behind France and West Germany, with a major reshaping of the domestic economy long overdue.  Critically, both men saw poor productivity and a flagging growth rate as a spur for embracing European competition, emulating continental working practices and radically reshaping industrial relations.  Unlike Mrs Thatcher and her closest acolytes, Henderson saw no cause to humble and humiliate the trade union movement, arguing for a corporatist model of industrial co-determination and an end to outmoded restrictive practices: with corporate governance enshrined in law, British trade unionists should look back to the late ’forties and ask why they believed the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund to be an ideal model for West Germany but not the UK.  After decades of dealing with dockyard workers and civil service unions Mountbatten could only agree.  Unsurprisingly, he had a paternalistic view of trade unions, with a healthy respect born out of wartime experience.  As the much-mythologised captain of the much-mythologised Kelly, Mountbatten never stinted in his praise of Tyneside shipbuilders and of lower deck conscripts fresh from the shopfloor.

Anticipating the EEC’s transition into the European Union, Henderson interpreted closer economic integration as the means of improving productivity and of increasing domestic R and D.  Unlike Germany or the United States, the United Kingdom had too often failed to exploit new technology and key advances in applied science: a systemic focus on short-term returns meant inadequate investment in accelerating progress from the lab or the test bed through to final production.  British banking had much to learn from its German counterpart, not least in the interface between finance and industry.  Medium-size businesses required the same level of financial support enjoyed by their mittelstand counterparts both sides of the Rhine.  At the other end of the spectrum, large enterprises facing disproportionate investment costs should look to cross-border collaboration, as was now the norm inside the aerospace industry.  An unrepentant ambassador bemoaned what now we would label British exceptionalism, dismissing the emotional crutch of wartime victory and signalling the low esteem in which the United Kingdom was now viewed by its European neighbours.  Plus ça change.

Henderson highlighted obvious lessons from the Federal Republic, and from Germany prior to 1933, but he was equally insistent that much could be learnt from France; not least the immediate and longer-term impact of Monnet’s Commissariat Général du Plan.  While endorsing Henderson’s narrative of relative decline, Conservative admirers of Hayek like Sir Keith Joseph dismissed France’s postwar planning initiative as dirigiste and a distortion of the free market.  Yet the departing diplomat was addressing the Foreign Secretary of a party which under both Attlee and Wilson had tried and failed to establish a counterweight to the Treasury.  By 1979 that failure to create a department of state powerful enough to reshape the economy was a fading memory for ministers haunted by wage-driven inflation, high energy costs, global recession and morale-sapping industrial unrest.  Sir Nicholas acknowledged all of this, but he saw salvation in the embrace of a communauté mentality from which leading left-wingers inside the Cabinet, notably Michael Foot and Tony Benn, instinctively recoiled.

Not so David Owen, whose departure from the Foreign Office in May 1979 would lead in less than two years to the unequivocally pro-Europe Limehouse Declaration and a fledgling SDP.  Nor Lord Louis, digesting the Economist scoop in his Broadlands breakfast room.  If always a realist when dealing with NATO colleagues, by instinct Mountbatten was a European – unsurprisingly so given his family background.  Henderson contrasted his principled insistence on pointing out the unpalatable with the Berlin Embassy’s ‘tailored reporting’ at the height of Appeasement.  Such sentiments doubtless resonated with Mountbatten, fiercely proud of his credentials as an anti-appeaser.  Concluding on a positive note, Henderson maintained that it was not too late to fire the British people, ‘with a sense of national will such as others have found these past years.  For the benefit of ourselves and of Europe…’   Here for Mountbatten was a familiar call to arms.

Never a nuclear fetishist, Mountbatten shared Henderson’s belief that an independent deterrence was a comfort blanket, disguising harsh geopolitical reality and a myriad of national ills.  Nor, as India’s last Viceroy and a supporter of decolonisation across south-east Asia, was Mountbatten an imperial nostalgist.  Like Henderson, he saw the accelerated withdrawal from empire initiated by Macmillan as signalling a fundamental reappraisal of the UK’s status within the Commonwealth, its role and standing within the Western Alliance, and its relationship with continental Europe.  Macmillan commissioned just such a reappraisal, in the process trying and failing to join the Common Market.  For Henderson and for Mountbatten a belated entry into the EEC had signally failed to facilitate the UK redefining its place in the non-Soviet world, repairing its frayed social fabric, and rebooting its economy in a manner comparable to France and Germany after 1945.  Yet in his valedictory despatch Henderson was emphatic that it was by no means too late: the nation could still have its Year Zero, and doubtless this is what appealed to the driest of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet colleagues.

Nicko Henderson lived thirty years longer than Dickie Mountbatten – long enough to witness a transformation in the British economy he neither envisaged nor desired, most evidently the prioritising of the service sector over manufacturing.  He noted, doubtless with disdain, a mounting Euroscepticism inside the Conservative Party.  Yet never, even in his darkest moments, could he have envisaged his country out of the EU and strategically bankrupt.  Similarly, were Mountbatten still alive he would question the concept of ‘Global Britain’ and the notion of an ‘Anglosphere’, while at the same time lamenting the toxic legacy of Brexit.  Both Henderson and Mountbatten shared a keen sense of crisis, but four decades on the vision revealed in the Economist contrasts starkly with harsh reality.  Neither man could ever have anticipated England’s lingering ambivalence towards Europe providing ambitious, sometimes unscrupulous, politicians with the means of transcending deep division and securing an exceptional degree of power and influence.

A professor, based at the Centre for Cancer Immunology, has been appointed to a national role aiming to improve and expand cancer services in the UK.

Peter Johnson, Professor of Oncology, has been named as the UK Government’s new Cancer Mission Chair. The Cancer Healthcare Mission aims to drive progress and innovation in responding to some of the biggest healthcare issues of our times.

The announcement was made as part of the Office of Life Sciences ‘Life Sci for Growth’ package, which aims to boost the Life Sciences sector.

This new role is in addition to Professor Johnson’s role as National Clinical Director for Cancer as well as his University priorities.

He said: “My aim is to ensure we have the best possible alignment between the NHS cancer programme and the mission of Office of Life Sciences to make the UK one of the most pro-innovation healthcare systems in the world, in addition to being a prime destination for research, investment and innovation across medicines, medical technologies and digital health.

“We have already done a lot in this area, ranging from the NHS-Galleri study, the largest randomised trial in the world of a multi-cancer early detection blood test to screen for multiple different types of cancer, to the investigation of artificial intelligence to diagnose cancers sooner in primary care, to working with the makers of mRNA vaccines to accelerate their trials in personalised cancer vaccines.

“The NHS has huge potential to test innovations, and this is an exciting chance to bring the best ideas into clinical testing and practice.”

Scientists at the Centre for Cancer Immunology are to begin a new study to better understand why certain natural killer T cells are more effective against cancer than others.

In pre-clinical studies, Invariant Natural Killer T (iNKT) cells have been shown to fight cancer as well as stimulate an anti-cancer reaction in the body. However, translation into human cancer patient trials has been less successful.

Funded by a pump priming grant from the Southampton Enterprise Fund, this new study aims to identify which type of iNKT cell can be used to efficiently kill tumour cells.

The team will be led by Dr Salah Mansour and Dr Ali Roghanian.

Dr Mansour commented: “This study builds on previous work from our group, demonstrating that certain iNKT cells are more effective against tumour cells than others. We believe that previous iNKT-based approaches have been less successful partly because iNKT cells are defective in cancer patients but also because those studies have not exploited more potent iNKT cell subsets that have a greater tendency to kill tumour cells. We are very excited to continue developing this translational project and hope to be able to demonstrate the efficacy of these cells in bespoke pre-clinical models of cancer developed at Southampton”

The scientists hope this novel strategy can be used to develop future off-the-shelf adoptive cellular therapies against various cancers, including CAR-iNKT cells against solid tumours.

Pump priming funding provides vital support to researchers who have early concept ideas that need further investigation before more substantive funding from external sources can be secured.

Scientists at the Centre for Cancer Immunology are to begin a new study to better understand why certain natural killer T cells are more effective against cancer than others.

In pre-clinical studies, Invariant Natural Killer T (iNKT) cells have been shown to fight cancer as well as stimulate an anti-cancer reaction in the body. However, translation into human cancer patient trials has been less successful.

Funded by a pump priming grant from the Southampton Enterprise Fund, this new study aims to identify which type of iNKT cell can be used to efficiently kill tumour cells.

The team will be led by Dr Salah Mansour and Dr Ali Roghanian.

Dr Mansour commented: “This study builds on previous work from our group, demonstrating that certain iNKT cells are more effective against tumour cells than others. We believe that previous iNKT-based approaches have been less successful partly because iNKT cells are defective in cancer patients but also because those studies have not exploited more potent iNKT cell subsets that have a greater tendency to kill tumour cells. We are very excited to continue developing this translational project and hope to be able to demonstrate the efficacy of these cells in bespoke pre-clinical models of cancer developed at Southampton”

The scientists hope this novel strategy can be used to develop future off-the-shelf adoptive cellular therapies against various cancers, including CAR-iNKT cells against solid tumours.

Pump priming funding provides vital support to researchers who have early concept ideas that need further investigation before more substantive funding from external sources can be secured.

The Southampton Clinical Trials Unit (SCTU) based at the Centre for Cancer Immunology has been given a multi-million-pound boost by Cancer Research UK.

Ahead of International Clinical Trials Day (May 20th), Cancer Research UK has announced it is to invest £5.5m at the SCTU over the next five years, to run world-leading trials which test new cancer treatments and help find ways to diagnose the disease at an earlier stage.

The SCTU comprises a team of expert clinical trialists who work with doctors, scientists and patient representatives across the UK. Together they design, run and evaluate trials of new treatments, medical interventions and diagnostic tools to create the evidence that they should be standard of care for future patients in the NHS.

Read the full story here.