تابع رؤية 2030
بذكاء سياقي

Emmanuel Macron, the host of the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, has framed an agenda to make it as palatable as possible to his guest of honour, but the French president has no idea if Donald Trump, a haphazard summit attender, will last the full three days – or disrupt the proceedings every hour he stays. The US president quit the last G7 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, early to work on the Iran conflict, and this year, plus ça change, Iran may also draw presidential attention. For good measure, he insulted this summit’s host before leaving Canada last year, describing Macron as “publicity seeking” and adding: “Purposefully or not, Emmanuel Macron always gets it wrong.” Macron, who will be attending his 10th G7 summit, chose not to take umbrage, and has even postponed the start of the summit to allow Trump to celebrate his 80th birthday with a UFC event on the White House lawn. Macron is holding out a dinner in Versailles on Wednesday night as a reward if Trump stays the three days; French officials say Trump adores the palace’s gold, and insist the two men respect each other. It will be touch and go if Trump completes the summit. Reports out of Washington suggest the US president has not been in celebratory mood, and the temptation for him will be to insult his six fellow leaders – representing Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – for lacking the loyalty to join his earlier plan to reopen the strait of Hormuz through force. At best, he will be demanding the planned Franco-British naval taskforce to enforce the restoration of freedom of navigation, as outlined in the US-Iran joint memorandum of understanding, moves quickly. De-mining is also urgently needed if the hundreds of tankers backed up in the strait are to reach the arteries of the world economy in time. View image in fullscreen Emmanuel Macron will issue a chairman’s summary on discussions over the conflicts in Gaza and Iran, and concise communiques after each working session on other topics. Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/AFP/Getty Images The other G7 leaders – all opposed to the Iran war, with the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, describing it as a US humiliation – will have to decide whether to look ahead, or pass verdict on a war that has upended the world economy. Trump appears to be in a state of denial about the economic impact of the war. He told Fox News last week that oil prices had not risen as much as many predicted, adding: “You know what I really love. I love the inflation.” The World Bank in a report on Thursday cut forecast world growth this year from 2.9% to 2.5%, taking growth to its lowest global level since the Covid pandemic. The Bank of Japan is expected to raise interest rates to a 31-year high, as wholesale prices have climbed at the fastest pace in three years. Europe’s central bank on Wednesday raised interest rates for the first time since 2023 amid fears of inflation going over 3% this year. The French central bank’s governor, Emmanuel Moulin, Macron’s former chief of staff, predicted “persistent” coming inflation. He may have noticed that container shipping rates have doubled since the start of the war, and are unlikely to decline soon. The French foreign ministry says the world’s poorest will suffer most as fertiliser and food prices soar. Commodity prices are to rise 22%, the World Bank predicts, against the 7% fall expected at the start of the year. Chronic indebtedness will worsen as interest rates rise. This was happening, the World Bank pointed out, as international development aid was falling “and is expected to decline further, stripping away one of the last remaining buffers that countries depend on to sustain schools, health care, and food assistance programmes”. Trump also faces being cornered by two other even more persistent wars – Ukraine and Gaza. Macron wants to see Europe given a greater role in solving both conflicts, pointing out it is Europe, not the US, that is saving Ukraine from bankruptcy. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, is promoting the idea of an EU envoy for Ukraine – the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, has been mentioned – but Macron is sceptical about the post. European credibility on defence has also been weakened by the failure of the Franco-German FCAS fighter-jet project, while the resignation of the UK defence secretary, John Healey, shows Britain’s fiscal problems. Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend on Tuesday, and recent progress on the battlefield means the Ukrainian president can remind Trump he did hold more cards than the US president thought. However, at the same time, Ukraine’s civilian death toll in May was the highest since the war began. France will also be pressing for the US to resolve the impasse in Gaza over Hamas disarmament. Trump will meet leaders from Qatar, UAE and Egypt to discuss the crisis and the fallout from Iran. But there will be no attempt to sign a joint communique on the conflicts and Macron will instead issue a summary. The French president also plans to issue concise communiques after each working session; common ground will be sought on critical mineral supply chains, artificial intelligence, containing damage from geopolitical conflicts, and reforming international development partnerships. Tech titans attending the summit on Wednesday will include Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, and Arthur Mensch, the French founder of Mistral AI, giving Macron a chance to promote his regulatory initiatives – which include banning social media for those under 15 or 16. View image in fullscreen The climate crisis, normally a G7 staple, has been kept off the Évian agenda as it will provoke a row. Photograph: Harold Cunningham/Getty Images The climate crisis, normally a G7 staple, has been kept off the agenda as it will provoke a row. But in a deft piece of diplomacy, Macron has chosen to make global economic imbalances – code for booming Chinese exports and accusations that Chinese state subsidies are fuelling a record Chinese trade surplus – a centrepiece of the formal summit as it is a subject on which Europe and the US identify a shared culprit. Chinese success in high-value products such as electric vehicles has become all the more alarming for Europe as these are sectors the west thought it would dominate. For France and other EU states facing manufacturing job losses, it sounds at times as if the only solution will be protectionism and EU tariffs on Chinese products. But Macron has been careful to try to frame this debate as one of greater collective solidarity, as opposed to China-bashing, to prevent what remains of the multilateral trading system from fragmenting further. The G7 had to “help China to generate the internal demand that it really needs”, he explained at an event last week attended by video by the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing. Europe for its part had to address under-investment, Macron said. Little that Zhang said strayed from the usual Chinese denial of unfair trade practices, arguing that the country could hardly be blamed for pursuing a successful industrial policy. If the worst comes to the worst, the Évian golf course – which dates back to 1904 – is closed for the three days, and if the earnest summitry gets too much, it represents an escape route for the world’s most famous 80-year-old golfer.

Iranian hardliners have mounted a rearguard rejection of a proposed deal with the US as backers in the regime defend themselves against charges it does not guarantee sanctions relief, compensation or control of the strait of Hormuz. “The fact that they say we won and America has retreated is a blatant lie,” the Iranian MP Kamran Ghazanfari said. Meysam Nili, the managing director of Rajanews and brother-in-law of the hardline former president Ebrahim Raisi, called the deal on the table a catastrophic capitulation. He urged Iranians not to sit quietly. Faced with the onslaught, Iranian officials led by Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the head of the negotiating team, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, mounted a detailed rebuttal in an audio message insisting the deal would end the war, including Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, and that Tehran has not been required to make any new commitments on its nuclear programme, leaving the means of disposal of its highly enriched uranium – including down-blending inside Iran – to future discussions lasting 60 days. Mohammadi also said that by referring to “Iranian arrangements”, the text would allow Iran and Oman to charge fees for passage through the strait of Hormuz, and would even prevent Israeli commercial ships using the waterway. The US had fought hard to have the phrase “Iranian arrangements” excluded, he claimed, and in the second phase of the deal had agreed to lift primary sanctions for the first time. His explanation is sharply at odds with the critics on points of fact and interpretation, which he said was because they were working from outdated drafts. View image in fullscreen Vessels anchored in the strait of Hormuz, as seen from Musandam, Oman, on Sunday. ‘The strait is in our hands,’ said Mehdi Mohammadi. ‘We can close it any time we want.’ Photograph: Reuters On the nuclear programme, Mohammadi said the only statement in the text was that Iran would not build or purchase nuclear weapons, which he said was “what we have been saying for years”. He said the proposed deal was better for Iran than the 2015 nuclear pact agreed under Barack Obama that lifted sanctions in return for limits on its nuclear activities, because Tehran had shown it could control the strait of Hormuz. “This time, it is not like we will shut down the nuclear programme and wait for them to lift the sanctions,” he said. “There is no such wishful thinking. The strait is in our hands, we can close it any time we want at an hour.” He acknowledged that the text on the release of half of Iran’s frozen money held abroad, roughly $12bn (£9bn), had not been finalised. “We know that America will not give us money,” he said. “The Arab countries have pledged this money and are forced to give it, because we are above them and they have seen our power in the region and have tasted our power. One of the implications of this agreement is that the Arab countries have been forced to accept Iran’s sovereignty and superiority and participate in making concessions.” Critics in Iran aiming their fire at Ghalibaf and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are from a group in the parliament coalesced around the Paydari Front including Mahmoud Nabavian, a hardline member of the national security committee, commenters such as Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor-in-chief of the Kayhan newspaper, and a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who worked alongside Russia in Syria. The opponents have mounted protests outside the foreign ministry in Tehran, and launched a “we will not accept” hashtag. Government supporters say the Paydari Front is opposed to any deal and is not representative of ordinary Iranians, who know wars against superpowers rarely end in outright victory. Shariatmadari wrote in an open letter: “We must ask Mr Ghalibaf and Mr Araghchi, wasn’t closing the strait of Hormuz one of our country’s main levers in the Ramadan war, and wasn’t closing the strait blocking the enemy’s commercial and economic breathing space and bringing it close to suffocation?! With what logical justification and acceptable explanation are these gentlemen going to give up this fateful lever?! “They say ‘we will charge service fees from passing ships’! That’s it?! America and its allies have martyred former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic world shed the blood of dozens of nuclear scientists and high-ranking military commanders, hundreds of innocent people and oppressed students. They have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage … and now by opening the strait of Hormuz and charging service fees (!) from passing ships, we are going to release their economic and commercial bottleneck?!” View image in fullscreen Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and adviser to the head of the negotiating team, has been challenged over the plans to reopen the strait of Hormuz. Photograph: Iranian Parliament Speaker Office/Wana/Reuters The hardline Shia cleric and MP Hajatoleslam Naboyan, who acts as the de facto foreign affairs spokesman for the Paydari Front, appeared incredulous that the proposed agreement appeared to allow free commercial shipping in the strait. “Will Israeli commercial ships also be freed? It is the proposal of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said. “From now on, all Israeli ships, not military, all hostile countries, their ships and their movement in the strait of Hormuz must be freed.” The Khorosan newspaper expressed concern at the licence given to the critics of the proposed agreement. “If the regime is going to grant freedom of speech and assembly to this group so that they can chant slogans against the negotiations and the negotiators, similar freedom must be given to those in favour of the agreement so that they can also gather and march in support of the regime’s decision to end the war, sign the agreement, and even resume relations with the United States,” it said. “Then it will become clear that the majority of the Iranian people support the regime’s will for the agreement, and the minority cannot impose its will on the regime and the nation through shouting, using the national radio and television, abusing the gatherings.” The hardliner’s criticism may help Donald Trump as the US president seeks to justify the deal as better than Obama’s. The two deals are not directly comparable, however, because the 2015 deal was a specific and detailed arms control agreement while the memorandum is focused on the preconditions for a ceasefire. Trump, who faces accusations that he has only achieved an agreement through a disruptive, expensive and illegal war that he could have reached through diplomacy, needs evidence that it is superior to the one Obama struck and from which he withdraw the US in 2018.

I was a fourth-grader in the public schools of California when I first learned about the Gold Rush. I remember our teacher, Mrs Dyer, passing down the story in the manner of lore. On the morning of 24 January 1848, James Marshall, a New Jersey boy come west, stumbled upon four shiny nuggets alongside the American River. He tried to keep his discovery a secret, but the shout of “eureka” from the dirt streets of San Francisco rang out across the shore. It unleashed a force that could not be contained. No need for manifest destiny. Overnight, 80,000 dreamers of every color, creed and country poured in. I didn’t know back then how story became myth and myth became story. The sordid details of history would be mine to fill in. The Gold Rush was California’s first extraction, a flash that cannonballed the whole mad state into being, and it ended the way all such plunders do. A handful of wealthy San Francisco industrialists made off with the riches. Marshall died so poor he could barely cover the price of his burial. Hydraulic mining, the state’s first invention sold to the world, had blasted out an immense crater in the Sierra Nevada, a desecration that let loose a torrent of environmental ruin. In a landmark decision, a judge shut down the mining industry in 1884. The crater, a symbol of California creation and destruction, was declared a state historic park. But the fever of gold mining did not pass. All around me, from inland to coast, the fire of extraction still burns. I have spent more than half my life chronicling the exploitations of California, so I know delirium to be a condition of the land. It took up residence in the body of the infant state and went on to spawn further extractions – a piling-on of audacities – so that one unthinkable taking gave rise to an even more unthinkable taking, and on and on through the generations. Now, the Golden state has spun itself into a new and more menacing age of plunder: the mining of water and the mining of our minds. In the San Joaquin valley, farmers divert the great rivers and tap the ancient aquifer to grow nuts, fruits and vegetables. Their irrigated flatland is one of the most dramatic alterations of the Earth’s surface in human history. But the water can no longer keep up with the bounty. The drained earth, and all that has been built upon it, is sinking. double quotation mark The Golden state has spun itself into a new and more menacing age of plunder: the mining of water and the mining of our minds In Silicon Valley, lords of tech harness untold amounts of water and electricity to power more data-processing centers. The project of artificial intelligence feeds on human consciousness itself. Algorithms lay waste to our brains. Robots instruct our children how to expertly tie nooses to better hang themselves. Bombs guided by the pinpoint of AI erase Gaza and slaughter tens of thousands of innocents. Each thing sprouts from the same fertile ground: the soil that is California. From my perch in the middle of the state, I swear I can feel an agitation disrupting the land and its people. Like a drone, it carries the sound of a hum. California’s eternal grab for more has never seemed so desperate. On a fall day, chasing the hum, I set out on the road to tell the story of two places, without heed, each pursuing one last extraction. I am driving across the western flank of the San Joaquin valley, heading in the direction of Coalinga, a small town in Fresno county that owes its entire existence, right down to its name, to the digging for earth’s riches. The leveled ground seems to be holding its breath. The nut harvest, nearly 5bn pounds of almonds and pistachios jolted off the trees in a filthy cloud, is already in swing. These are the factories in the fields conceived in the mid- to late 1800s by the same San Francisco barons who pocketed gold’s riches. Year after year, Fresno county, where I was born and have lived most of my life, ranks No 1 in food production for the nation. Our crop counts on a sun that shines 300 days a year, a never-ending flow of water and a workforce that won’t tire. What are the men and women toiling in the fields if not a faithful extraction, whereby the beckoning arm of California, for a century and counting, reaches deep into the rural heart of Mexico for a new generation’s fresh bodies. Our crop also counts on an ungodly amount of poison, which we regard as our dirty little secret never to be broached in a social setting. The year-round drift of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides floats from farms to schools to houses and into so many bodies now riddled with neurological disease. Parkinson’s Alley, as the epidemiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles have pinned it on the map, is the very road I’m driving on. I had shut tight my car windows before leaving suburbia, but there’s no escaping the air, for this is California’s sacrifice zone. Miles and miles stink of dung and diesel. We dwellers of cornucopia breathe in more particulate matter than anywhere else in the country. Our dairies aren’t mom and pop but factories of fine calibration that squeeze out milk from the teats of 1.3 million Holsteins. Out the other end shoots a river of shit that never stops flowing. The methane and ammonia toxify the already toxic air. Nitrates seep into the dwindling aquifer, fouling the wells people drink from. Industrial agriculture was the first modern system of extraction that California exported to the world. It inspired the other systems – ballistic warfare, higher education, suburban sprawl, green energy – that we happily produced on a mass scale, pretending not to notice whether it was wonder or woe we were selling. double quotation mark Industrial agriculture was the first modern system of extraction that California exported to the world Our abuse of the state’s extraordinary gift of natural resources collides with our desire to clean the air and water, shrink carbon’s footprint and create solar, wind and battery power. This is California’s great paradox, we tell ourselves, a state big and complicated and enough of a work in progress that we can have it both ways. In the halls of Sacramento governance, where our split personality is a grand exhibition, the recurring chant from Governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats is “abundance, abundance”, a magic wand that if waved wholeheartedly can summon the glories of California’s wide-open past. The abundance agenda, in the fever of their dream, will bring AI prosperity, more housing and less homelessness, and a high-speed rail line that isn’t a boondoggle but will connect rural to urban, coastal to inland, red to blue, so we’ll finally become one. There’s no capitalism, they whisper, like California capitalism. Let it do what it can do once more. On the outskirts of Coalinga, Chevron’s pump jacks are draining crude from the brown hills, and tens of thousands of cattle fatten up for slaughter in the largest feedlot in the west. There’s a gravel mine, a state prison and acre after acre of pistachio trees growing in dirt that still knows itself as desert. Turbine pumps hum, pulling up water that tastes like the sea. The pistachio, God blessed, is the one fruit-bearing tree that can stand such salt. Jimmy Anderson pulls up to Coalinga city hall with a rumble. His big white Ford Raptor is gleaming. His leather boots are shiny, too. He has come to the monthly meeting of the Pleasant Valley water district not from his own cattle feedlot on the dusty edge of town. He’s made the long drive from suburban Fresno, where his house sits along the river on the fifth hole of a country club. Anderson is partial to fifth holes. His multimillion-dollar house on the California coast, the one he flies to in his Swiss-made jet, is a chip shot from the fifth tee at Pebble Beach. As to any insinuation that he’s a faux farmer, Anderson has a swift and practiced reply. His family on his mother’s side, the Mourens, herded sheep here as far back as the 1860s. This was before miners in Coalinga pulled out the coal that gave the town its name, before wildcatters struck a gusher named “blue goose” in 1898 and turned Coalinga into the No 1 oil field in the state. The Mourens survived hard times to amass tens of thousands of acres. A trust-fund kid now nearing 60, Anderson has been wily enough to add on to the family fortune. This morning, a look of disquiet in his manner, he takes a seat in the meeting room with fellow farmers and district staff. Together, they listen as a young consultant with a water engineering firm explains just how dry they are. Whether they’re growing pistachios or row crops, overseeing thousands of acres of grazing land or feedlot ground, family farmers or big company men, their dominion as they knew it is no more. View image in fullscreen ‘For a century, California had allowed the full-throttle pumping of groundwater.’ Illustration: Matthew Brandt/The Guardian/Getty Images For a century, California had allowed the full-throttle pumping of groundwater. The agriculturalists believed that the aquifer, straight down to thousands of feet, was theirs to do as they pleased with. Then the drought of 2012 to 2016, the worst dry times, struck. Politicians in Sacramento decided the state couldn’t very well regard itself as America’s great progressive hope if it kept signaling to agriculture to “get yours while you can”. In 2014, California enacted the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act to limit the mining of our most imperiled resource. To keep the growers from complaining too much, the law came with a decade-long rollout. This led, quite expectedly, to a race to the bottom of the aquifer across five valley counties. Hedge funds, pension funds, the insurer John Hancock and the Mormon church joined a stampede of farmers, planting 600,000 more acres of nut trees and drilling thousands more wells. The land was sinking by the foot. Only recently had the free-

Devon Taylor remembers when the Mammee Bay shoreline in St Ann, Jamaica, was filled with children frolicking in the ocean after school, fishers haggling with locals over the price of their daily catch and craft vendors carving souvenirs under almond trees. “I grew up on Mammee Bay,” Taylor says. He recalls fetching seawater in bottles for his grandmother when she was no longer able to go to the beach, learning to swim in the shallows, and watching generations of fishers cast their nets. “That beach raised us. It fed us.” Today, Mammee Bay is ground zero in his war against a multibillion-dollar all-inclusive tourism model that the government says is the backbone of the country’s economy, but that he and other activists argue is “plantation tourism”, designed to benefit rich visitors and the elite and disadvantage most Jamaicans. In 2019, locals were locked out of the beach by a fence and armed state and private security guards hired by investors building all-inclusive luxury hotels, Taylor says. “In protest, the community ripped down the fence and reoccupied the beach, but because of the restrictions on movement in Covid, you could not be there at certain times, and when they came back they met concrete walls,” he says. This escalated into a “violent displacement”, says Taylor, the founder of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (Jabbem). “Gunshots were fired to disperse the protest.” For the people, it was a fight for survival, Taylor adds. “When you cut us off from the sea … you are actually setting us up to starve.” Mammee Bay and Little Dunn’s River in the northern parish of St Ann, the Blue Lagoon in the north-east, Bob Marley beach in St Andrews and Flankers/Providence beach in Montego Bay are the subject of five court cases, with the first trial scheduled for later this month. Each beach has its own story, Taylor says, but what they all have in common is communities that are being denied access to spaces that have social, economical and even spiritual significance, because successive governments have failed to address inequities inherited from colonial times when beaches and other land were owned by the British monarch. View image in fullscreen ‘We call it plantation tourism’, campaigners at the Blue Lagoon: Wilbourn Carr, Colin Beckford, Roseroy Gay, Leroy Patterson, Roy Williams, Donald Robinson. Photograph: Destinee Condison/The Guardian Still referred to as “crown land”, these were handed over to the Jamaican state when the country gained its independence in 1962, but much of the legal systems managing these lands, including the 1956 Beach Control Act, were retained. The law, which gave the state ownership of the island’s foreshore and seabed, meaning anyone wanting to use or develop on the beach needed government permission, is at the core of the all-inclusive tourism model that Taylor views as discriminatory. “We call it plantation tourism because it has all the characteristics of a plantation – exploitation of a poorly treated labour force, and wealth that either does not stay in our country or is only in the hands of the elite.” In the parish of Portland, campaigners say they were misled and betrayed by local authorities who closed the Blue Lagoon in 2022 with a promise to reopen in 90 days with improved facilities and more opportunities for local guides and vendors. They claim it was later discovered that the intention was to permanently close public access roads to the lagoon to facilitate the building of private villas, which they describe as an infringement on their rights. The 55-metre-deep (180ft) lagoon, hugged by lush, green vegetation and renowned for its mystical, fluid colour palette that is turquoise, sapphire or azure depending on how the sun hits it, is a treasure that they refuse to surrender. “For generations this beach has sustained all the communities around it,” says Colin Beckford, the president of the Blue Lagoon Alliance. Wilbourn Carr, 73, who has been going to the lagoon to swim since he was 14, says: “This space is not just for recreation, food and vending, it is also where our elderly come for the healing properties of the mineral spring from the mountain that feeds the lagoon.” View image in fullscreen In Flankers, campaigners are fighting for the beach, which has been neglected by the state for decades, to be restored. Photograph: Destinee Condison/The Guardian More than 100 miles away in Flankers, fellow campaigners have filed an injunction to block developers from building in the sea and are fighting for the beach, which has been neglected by the state for decades, to be restored. “Our foreparents shed blood for this land. We shouldn’t be forced to fight for what is already ours,” says one campaigner, Olando Brown. “Being a Rastafarian, I meditate a lot, and this provides a space for me to do that. Why take away this beautiful gem from the people instead of trying to develop it with us?” “The fisher folk need this space,” says Jabbem’s community coordinator for western Jamaica, Monique Christie, adding that it is important for local families who cannot afford expensive holidays. “You can pack some food, freeze some juice, walk to the beach and enjoy some of the natural resources of your country without it being a massive expense for the family.” In Little Dunn’s River, Jabbem’s director of community engagement, Damion Coombs, echoes Taylor’s concerns. “We are generating the revenue but we’re not gaining from it,” he says. View image in fullscreen ‘An anti-colonial fighter’ … Devon Taylor at Portland. Photograph: supplied Speaking above the acoustic rush of the cascading waterfall, he compares the justification that beach access protects the tourism industry from crime to the colonial logic of “keeping out the savages”, with the local people considered unworthy of enjoying their coastlines. Matthew Samuda, Jamaica’s minister of environment and climate change, said his government was committed to ensuring “that its natural assets also benefit its citizens”. “It’s why we built the Harmony beach park in Montego Bay. It’s why we will build the Success beach park on the eastern side of St James,” he said. He added that recent approvals for new development, “especially where public land was involved in the development, have insisted that developers carve out what you call corridors to the sea”. Jamaica’s geography made beach access a complex issue, Samuda said. “Jamaica is not blessed quite with a total surrounding of our coastline by beach. We have a lot of rocky areas … [and] areas that are inaccessible because of wetlands and biodiversity reserves that you simply can’t get through to get to.” View image in fullscreen ‘Generating revenue but not gaining from it’, waterfalls in Little Dunn’s River. Photograph: Destinee Condison/The Guardian In March, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, proposed a beach access and management policy, which promises to modernise the legislation and increase access. Campaigners say the policy still allows unacceptable restrictions. Coombs says: “We are still talking about ‘qualified rights’, meaning somebody can decide if you come in – and maybe charge a fee. What we are fighting for is free, legal, unfettered, forever rights.” Jabbem is also concerned that the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (Narra) Act, passed in March to fast‑track the country’s post‑Hurricane Melissa rebuilding, will have a negative impact on current and future court cases. Campaigners say the act is designed to weaken the older Prescription Act, which they say protects the legal right to land or pathways that have been continuously used as a public access route for at least 20 years. Taylor says Narra lacks checks and balances and concentrates power in the office of the prime minister. But Samuda defended the act, insisting that it facilitated the “large-scale, urgent procurement … required to build in resilience before the next storm”. “There’s no weakening of oversight,” he said. “You still have to come to the parliament. You still require the necessary permits. What it does is it guarantees a timely response to delivery of projects.” Jabbem has stressed it is not partisan and that administrations from both the ruling Jamaica Labour party and the opposition People’s National party (PNP) created the beach access crisis. “The government’s power … also comes from the opposition’s complicity when they formed the government,” Coombs says. The shadow environment minister, Omar Newell, said he recognised the “significant value” of the beaches to local communities and his party was listening to the concerns of beach access activists. “Yes, successive administrations have presided over the privatisation of our beaches. It needs to stop,” he said. Taylor, an immunologist who has a PhD in biochemistry, says the battle for beach access has made him an “anti-colonial fighter”. “I am a Rastafarian and a son of Jamaica,” he says, “and so this movement has driven me to become an environmental defender, but also an anti-colonial fighter, fighting against the vestiges of colonialism and the colonial logic of land dispossession, exploitation of people and the degradation of the natural environment.” The Guardian’s connections to enslavement: can an institution atone for its history? On Thursday 2 July, join Maya Wolfe-Robinson, Ebony Riddell Bamber, Prof Verene A Shepherd and Ahmad Ward in this free event for a wide-ranging discussion on the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

As the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote approaches, the verdict on Britain’s economic performance is clear: voting to leave has resulted in severe costs for households and businesses. The immediate recession predicted in the Treasury forecasts ordered by George Osborne – dubbed “project fear” by the Leave campaign – did not happen. The impact from the Covid pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Iran, and Donald Trump’s trade battles also cloud the picture. But experts agree the long-term forecasters were on the money: the economy is significantly smaller than it would otherwise have been, trade has suffered, business investment and productivity growth have stalled, and families are on average thousands of pounds a year worse. Charlie Bean, a former Bank of England deputy governor, who reviewed the Treasury forecasts, said: “Osborne has a lot to answer for when he was basically saying, ‘Treasury analysis shows – look, there is going to be a deep recession tomorrow.’ “That was really misrepresenting what you could take from [it] and overselling it, obviously to try and win the argument politically. In hindsight, we had the vote and the world didn’t fall off the cliff immediately, and so the Brexiters can say [it] wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. “But the assessment of the broad long-run was in the right ballpark. We’re poorer than we otherwise would have been.” Here are the charts highlighting the economic consequences. double quotation mark In hindsight, we had the vote and the world didn’t fall off the cliff immediately, and so the Brexiters can say the Treasury analysis wasn’t worth the paper it was written on Charlie Bean The pound is below its pre-EU referendum level The value of the pound swung wildly after the polls closed on 23 June 2016. As Nigel Farage appeared ready to concede defeat, the currency gained. But early leave victories in key locations, including Sunderland, prompted a 10% plunge in the pound on what was its biggest ever one-day fall. The collapse in the pound drove up the cost of importing goods, triggering an inflation shock that damaged the public finances and inflicted financial pain on households across the country. Exporters – who typically benefit from a weaker currency because their products become cheaper for overseas buyers – failed to take advantage as uncertainty clouded trade appetite. A decade later, the pound has never returned above its pre-Brexit level, hitting British holidaymakers in the pocket. From close to $1.50 against the dollar and €1.31 against the euro just after polling closed, the pound stands at $1.34 and €1.15. UK growth has slowed There are reasons why the Brexit recession never materialised: mostly because the Treasury forecast assumed an immediate no-deal departure, rather than continued EU membership until 31 January 2020 – before an 11-month transition period and other deals since. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent Treasury watchdog, the UK is on track to suffer a 4% hit to national income over a 15-year period. At the decade mark, analysis by Nick Bloom, a leading British economist at Stanford university in the US, and others in a research paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, show that UK GDP per head is between 6% and 8% lower than it would have been without Brexit. Based on performance relative to 33 other advanced economies, the analysis shows that Britain roughly tracked these countries closely until 2016, before a large gap in output opened up. “The statistics are really clear: the UK has grown more slowly after Brexit than before,” Bloom said. “Is it because of Brexit? Probably. You can’t be absolutely certain, but I don’t see anything else that would open up this gap with the UK and everyone else.” Trade has suffered from more border friction Brexit involved erecting trade barriers, which has hit goods exports. The EU is still the UK’s largest trading partner: in 2025, exports to the bloc were worth £385bn (41% of all UK exports) and imports £474bn (49% of the total). Since the end of the EU transition period on 31 December 2020, growth in UK goods exports has slowed relative to the G7. But service exports have performed more strongly. The OBR estimates this is because the UK-EU trade and cooperation agreement Boris Johnson agreed with Brussels created more friction for goods than services. Exporters, in particular, face more red tape and border delays. Bloom compared the situation to a shop moving from the centre of town to the outskirts: “You make it harder to get there and back, and not surprisingly there is less demand. And you add to the uncertainty by opening and closing all the time, and people don’t know if you’re there.” Uncertainty sapped business investment After a shock result, no clear plan from the government or leave campaigners led to years of infighting over just what Brexit – never properly defined, and often subjective – should be in practice. Amid that political turmoil businesses froze their investment plans. As a consequence, investment is estimated to be close to 18% lower than it would have been under remain and productivity up to 4% lower, reflecting reluctance to invest in equipment and projects due to the uncertainty. John Springford, of the Centre for European Reform, said: “The investment strike started in 2016 and continued through to 2021-22, and then it started to rise again once certainty about the trading relationship had been established. “That has an impact on productivity. It means workers don’t have the best kit, and existing capital [equipment and buildings] is deteriorating, so you certainly assign some of the GDP losses to that. “Brexit is more a story of stagnation, and a slow puncture, than of recession and rising unemployment.” Employment has suffered Unemployment in the UK fell after the Brexit referendum to among the lowest rates since the 1970s, before rising sharply during the pandemic. However, experts say this obscured underlying challenges. First, wage growth has stagnated. Average real wages barely grew until picking up strength after the pandemic, and even given recent faster growth are only £43 a week higher on average, after taking inflation into account. Britain emerged as the worst-performing country in the G7 for the pace of its recovery in workforce participation after the easing of pandemic restrictions, with rising ill-health pushing up economic inactivity – when working-age adults are neither in a job nor looking for one. Young people have borne the brunt of weaker participation rates, including an increase in the number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training (Neet) to more than a million, the highest level since 2013. According to Bloom, employment in the UK is between 3% and 4% lower than it would have been under a remain scenario. Brexit support has faded Public support for Brexit has steadily fallen since the 52%-48% leave vote. Polling last month by YouGov shows 70% of Britons support a closer relationship with the EU without rejoining the bloc, its single market or customs union. More than two-thirds think looser ties would be a mistake. A majority – 56% – would back rejoining the bloc outright. Support to rejoin is strongest among Green and Labour voters, and weakest among backers of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, of whom 83% are opposed. Net immigration surged, but is now falling Post-Brexit, despite the promises of the leave campaign and the Conservative government, net migration to the UK rose sharply, reaching a record high of almost 1m in the year to June 2023. The war in Ukraine and pent-up demand for migration after the easing of Covid restrictions played a contributing role. But changes to migration rules after Brexit also had an impact. Almost 90% of arrivals have been from outside the EU, while net migration from the 27-country bloc has fallen. Employers have struggled with staff shortages amid the loss of previously readily available EU workers, particularly in construction, hospitality and manufacturing. Net migration has fallen further – dropping to 171,000 last year – amid tougher controls first introduced under the Conservatives that have since been tightened further under Labour.