The UK government鈥檚 plans for environment laws after Brexit are still not fit for purpose in parts, and there remain questions over the independence of a new environmental watchdog, MPs will warn today.

The criticism of the by the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) takes on greater importance in light of Prime Minister听Boris Johnson鈥檚 main EU withdrawal agreement bill, which was听. The withdrawal agreement bill contained no mention of protections over air pollution, water quality and other environmental issues. These issues were instead addressed in a second document, the Brexit political declaration, which isn鈥檛 legally binding.

MPs will today welcome the government shifting on some concerns raised previously by the committee. For example, the draft environment bill establishes that the new environmental watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), will now cover climate change issues, meaning there would be enforcement if future carbon targets were missed.

Greater independence

But EAC chair and Labour MP Mary Creagh says she is still worried, in particular about the independence of the OEP.

鈥淎t the moment, we have the European Commission judging whether we meet environmental targets, and they are clearly independent and can use a judicial route. We are very concerned the OEP will be funded by government, monitoring targets set by government and with a chair appointed by government,鈥� she told New 女生小视频.

Instead, the watchdog should have greater independence, with the EAC taking a role in appointing the OEP鈥檚 chair, she says.

Creagh says that only four key targets on air quality, water, biodiversity and waste reduction are explicitly set out in the draft environment bill, with听 deferred to a policy statement. That statement hasn鈥檛 been published yet and, Creagh points out, isn鈥檛 in the legislation, so could be easily overturned by future governments.

A spokesperson for the environment department says:听鈥淎s part of the proposals in the bill this, and any future government, would have to report annually on its progress to the independent Office for Environmental Protection, which will hold the government to account to make sure it is on track.鈥�

The intervention by MPs follows calls from London鈥檚 mayor Sadiq Khan yesterday for the government to amend the bill to adopt the World Health Organization鈥檚 targets on air pollution for 2030. There is no date yet for a second reading of the draft environmental bill, but it is thought it could take place next week.

听

A case of a man who appears to have experienced acute psychosis triggered by the UK鈥檚 2016 European Union referendum has been described in the journal BMJ Case Reports. The man, in his forties, is the first reported case of an acute psychotic disorder to have been brought on by the referendum.

The case report describes how the man鈥檚 health deteriorated rapidly after the poll鈥檚 result on 26 June 2016, as he cited 鈥渟ignificant concerns鈥� about Brexit. Three weeks later he was brought to a hospital emergency department in an agitated, perplexed and confused state.

After being admitted to a psychiatric ward, he described his family as multicultural and said he felt ashamed to be British. 鈥淚 was looking at the electoral map of voting for the EU. I am in a constituency that reflects an opinion that is not for me,鈥� he said.

The case is an extreme example, but there are signs of the wider mental health impact of the referendum result. Nearly two-thirds of people in the UK think anxiety over Brexit is bad for people鈥檚 health, . last year found that, after the referendum, self-reported wellbeing of a sample of people in the UK was lower than in samples from other countries.

The individual in his forties outlined how race issues and social media had played a role in his deteriorating mental state after the referendum. 鈥淎s well as my own anxieties about Brexit, it was also a time when a friend of mine was experiencing immense anxiety about what was happening around him in the US and we were talking together on social media about racial issues,鈥� he said.

Post-referendum, he began spending more time putting his thoughts across on social media, and became increasingly worried about racial incidents, his wife said. After admission to hospital, he was given drugs used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and recovered completely after two weeks. He had previously experienced a much less severe psychotic episode 13 years earlier, triggered by work-related stress.

鈥淏rexit appears to be the primary stressor because of the temporal proximity, the patient鈥檚 reported personal significance of the event, the nature of the evolution of the psychotic episode and the content of the psychopathology,鈥� says听Zia Katshu at the University of Nottingham, UK, who wrote the case report. Work and family stresses may have contributed too, he says.

鈥淭his single case report is only an anecdotal evidence of association of the stressor, Brexit referendum, with psychosis,鈥� says Katshu. 鈥淎 causal inference between the two can not be derived from it.鈥�

Sotiris Vandoros of King鈥檚 College London says the uncertainty brought on by Brexit may be one way that it negatively affects mental health. 鈥淲hile the financial effects of the referendum 鈥� with the exception of the exchange rate 鈥� were not immediate, the prospect of leaving the EU may have made people worry about the possibility of their employer relocating, their eligibility to work, or the economy in general,鈥� he says.

The threat of a no-deal Brexit is causing staff at several universities in the UK to stockpile scientific equipment, including protective gloves and fly food, New 女生小视频 has learned. Researchers say they want to ensure their experiments can continue should imports of materials be disrupted after the UK鈥檚 planned exit from the European Union on 31 October.

at Imperial College London says he and his colleagues have collected extra stores of the ingredients needed to make food for the thousands of fruit flies he uses in his experiments.

鈥淭he yeast is produced in France and travels via Belgium. The agar is imported from Japan. Polenta comes from Italy and fructose from Belgium,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he last thing one may want is to lose precious genetic stocks because lab food is not coming through. We can鈥檛 really stockpile much more than this, partly because it would be too expensive.鈥�

, also at Imperial, keeps 1000 zebrafish in her lab. She says that food and equipment needed to maintain the health of her aquariums comes from 鈥渁ll around the EU鈥�. She says she is stockpiling to ensure that she can uphold animal welfare.

Neil Hyatt at the听University of Sheffield, who researches radioactive waste management, has ordered an advance supply of the radioactive compound uranium dioxide. 鈥淲e have taken measures to procure sufficient material to deliver our current research order book,鈥� he says.

One researcher says they have even been prompted to check that they have enough robots for classes on artificial intelligence.

Others are so worried about a supply shortage that they declined to say what, exactly, they are stockpiling.

鈥淲e are indeed gathering together a few specific items that we know can be hard to come by or are critical for our plans over the next couple of months,鈥� says , who works on treatments for leukaemia at University College London. Fielding didn鈥檛 want to name the items in question, because she was worried about sparking a run on them. She says she only knows of one supplier for the items.

A UCL spokesperson says the university has been in touch with manufacturers to discuss the potential effects of Brexit.

鈥淲e have also encouraged individual faculties, departments and labs to take some proportionate responses themselves,鈥� says the spokesperson. 鈥淯CL鈥檚 Estates teams have been working with academic departments and labs to ascertain any additional storage needs in relation to this.鈥�

Some universities say they are not engaged in 鈥渨idespread鈥� stockpiling. 鈥淲e do not anticipate that large-scale stockpiling will be necessary,鈥� says a spokesperson for the University of Bath.

However, a copy of an email sent to some academics at Bath has been shared with New 女生小视频. For researchers relying on small, EU-based suppliers, the first piece of advice reads: 鈥淪tockpile if you can鈥�.

In total, New 女生小视频 received responses on the issue of stockpiling from nearly 30 academic staff and universities. Roughly 40 per cent of respondents confirmed some level of stockpiling.

Clearly, not everyone has decided to take such measures. , a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham, says he thinks the chances of a no-deal Brexit have fallen because a bill seeking in parliament.

The confusion over when Brexit will happen, and in what form, has led to sporadic stockpiling efforts at some institutions this year.

at the University of Bristol grows red blood cells in his lab to research human diseases. His lab first stockpiled certain materials prior to the previous Brexit deadline of 29 March.

鈥淟ast time we miscalculated and bought too many protective gloves, the boxes were everywhere,鈥� he says.

Other supplies stored up at the time have since been used, so Toye鈥檚 team is now stockpiling them again. This includes growth media and plastic containers, which, he says, take up a lot of space: 鈥淲e have bought hundreds of bottles.鈥�

Yesterday the UK government was forced to release a report describing the possible impact of the UK leaving the European Union without a deal at the end of October, which is looking increasingly possible. The plans had been codenamed .

Tell it to me straight 鈥� what鈥檚 the worst that could happen?

Some types of fresh food will be in short supply, thanks to queues of lorries building up at the Channel Crossing. The report says while there will be no overall shortage of food, Brexit 鈥渨ill reduce choice of products and will increase price鈥�. There may also be impact on the supply of drugs and medical supplies, which could mean operations having to be delayed and pharmacies running out of essential medicines like insulin.

Didn鈥檛 we know this already?

Such predictions have been widespread, but Brexit enthusiasts have tended to dismiss them as politically biased scaremongering 鈥� 鈥淧roject Fear鈥�. Now it鈥檚 clear that civil servants, who are supposed to be impartial, expect there to be at least some harmful consequences of leaving the European Union without a deal. They predict that from day one the lorry flow rate through the Channel could roughly halve, for up to three months, with 鈥渟ignificant disruption鈥� for another three months.

Haven鈥檛 businesses been planning for this?

They should have been, as at one point a no-deal Brexit looked on the cards for 29 March, but the UK was granted two extensions. The report warns, however, that the latest Brexit date makes things worse as it coincides with bad winter weather, as well as the usual seasonal flu outbreak. This will exacerbate any problems faced by hospitals. It also falls on a Friday in some schools鈥� half-term holidays, when more people travel. And the two extensions mean some businesses are in 鈥淓U Exit fatigue.鈥�

I know how they feel. Any other surprises?

What鈥檚 not on most people鈥檚 radar is the impact on data. Torrents of personal data flow back and forth between the UK and the EU, and after a no deal Brexit this would clash with Europe鈥檚 data protection rules. No one knows how social media and other tech companies are going to deal with this outcome and any new data-sharing agreement is likely to take years to be agreed.

What are the other pitfalls we should know about?

We鈥檝e been hearing a lot about shortages of medicines for humans, but the report warns that drugs for animals could also be affected, leaving farmers less able to deal with disease outbreaks. Air-freighting in veterinary medicines isn鈥檛 as financially viable as for human pharmaceuticals. There could also be petrol shortages in London and the South-East due to lorry queues reaching as far as the Dartford crossing, a bridge over the Thames on the M25.

Is there any good news?

The UK鈥檚 water supply is unlikely to be affected.

THE UK police are monitoring hundreds of thousands of Twitter posts related to Brexit every day. It is part of a pilot project to predict spikes in hate crimes in the run up to 31 October, when the UK is due to leave the European Union.

The Online Hate Speech Dashboard is being used by analysts at the National Police Chiefs鈥� Council鈥檚 online hate crime hub, which was established by the Home Office in 2017 to 鈥渢ackle the emerging threat of online hate crime鈥�.

It gathers Twitter posts from across the UK and uses artificially intelligent algorithms to detect speech that is, for example, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic or directed against people from certain countries or with disabilities or from LGBT+ groups.

at Cardiff University, UK, and his colleagues created the dashboard so that government organisations could monitor hate speech.

The dashboard flags between 500,000 and 800,000 tweets per day related to Brexit, of which between 0.2 per cent and 0.5 per cent are classified as hateful. About 0.2 per cent of these are from users tagged with city locations within the UK, which the dashboard presents as a map of hate hotspots. If there is a spike, the information can be passed by analysts to the relevant local police forces, says Williams. Previously, such monitoring had to be done manually.

The main aim of the project is to identify patterns of hate speech in the lead up to 31 October to warn police and support organisations of any potential issues.

The team recently established for the first time that an increase in hate speech on Twitter leads to a corresponding increase in crimes against minorities on London streets (British Journal of Criminology, ). The pattern is similar to what happens with domestic violence, which often escalates from verbal to physical abuse, says Williams.

The team found that as the number of tweets that were antagonistic about race, ethnicity or religion increased, so did the incidence of aggravated crimes, including violence, harassment and criminal damage. A similar study in 2018 found a link between the number of anti-refugee statements on Facebook and violent crimes against refugees in Germany.

Relevant government authorities such as police forces and councils may use the information from the hub for听counter-messaging on social media. These include awareness campaigns, reiterating zero tolerance for hate crimes and encouraging people to report incidents to True Vision, a national crime reporting hub.

鈥淭he dashboard flags between 500,000 and 800,000 Brexit-related tweets per day鈥�

Last year, the UK government launched a nationwide hate crime awareness campaign, which included adverts on social media.

The hope is that the dashboard will lead to a reduction in online hate speech. It includes information about the trends in hate speech against each group over time, and commonly used words and hashtags in hateful tweets. In addition, it shows networks of tweeters who interact with each other, although their identities are anonymised. These clusters can provide information about how much of the hate speech results from coordinated efforts, says Williams.

Williams and his colleagues measure the performance of the dashboard using an F1 score, a statistical measure of accuracy that takes into account the rate of true and false positives. 鈥淯sually, our algorithms come in between 85 and 95 per cent,鈥� says Williams.

Less than half of hate crimes are reported to the police. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, racially and religiously motivated crimes in the two nations spiked after the Brexit vote in 2016, with 5605 crimes reported in July that year, up 44 per cent from the same period in 2015.

People with racist views feel emboldened to target others by events like the vote, says Imran Awan at Birmingham City University, UK.

The police are often slow in reacting, he says. Awan attributes this to scepticism about the link between online and offline abuse. 鈥淭he perception is: 鈥楧o I really need to come out and speak to somebody because they鈥檝e posted a tweet?鈥�.鈥�

Hate-speech detection tools that analyse aggregated data may not be able to prevent individual acts of violence, says Timothy Quinn at Hatebase, a firm that provides hate speech resources to law enforcement agencies. Such tools are more useful for governments to identify overall rises in hate speech across a region, giving opportunities to prevent it escalating into violence in the form of riots, for example, he says.

The UK is at war, a cold civil war. Even many scientists, who are supposed to be smart and are among the most affected by it, fail to fully appreciate the consequences. This is because we live inside our societal bubbles, either supporting or loathing Brexit. Compromise has become a dirty word even for the very people who praise their flexibility and openness.

We need to snap out of this mindset. If we don鈥檛, things are only going to get worse, especially for UK science.

I voted remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum because I have lived and worked in many European countries and simply feel European. As a scientist, I cannot possibly appreciate the importance of keeping the imperial units some backward-looking Brexiteer 鈥淢ogglodytes鈥� treasure. So I am alright when people have derided me as an 鈥渦ngrateful immigrant鈥� . On the other hand, I cannot support calls for a second referendum. That has led some remainers to express their 鈥渄eep discontent with my lack of vision鈥�.

Why is my personal compromise so hard to understand? I am no longer against Brexit, only because I am against the disorderly version of it we鈥檙e now sleepwalking into. Maybe the problem is that I am too much of a researcher for my own good. I try to analyse things logically rather than emotionally.

Here is the logic bit. Imagine that the UK鈥檚 new prime minister Boris Johnson and the fanatic fringe push through a no-deal or similar Brexit on 31 October. Would this stop the civil war as many hope? No chance. The 48 per cent on the losing side of the referendum will continue to feel that their views and rights have been tossed aside, that they are being treated by the victors as prisoners of war. As for science, the likely economic hardship that will follow a no-deal Brexit would be a disaster, exacerbating the loss of EU funding.

You can appreciate how bad things are going to become by looking at the recent government announcement about speedy visas for top foreign scientists. The vice chancellors of some universities welcomed the move. I got only the chills. It was never hard for high-flying scientists to get work permits anywhere. The competition for the best minds is global and fierce. The countries that offer the best research opportunities and competitive funding win it, not those who offer the easiest visas.

So why did the prime minister focus on something that is nowhere near being a top priority for UK science? Because it is a promise that requires only hot air and not a penny. Spurring truly innovative scientific research of the sort that will contribute to the UK鈥檚 economic well-being requires a more far-sighted immigration policy and, most importantly, continuous funding at a level comparable to that in the US, Germany and other developed nations.

But imagine now that a divided Parliament blocks Brexit, calls a second referendum and remainers win, as many of my colleagues hope. What a nightmare. Even moderate Brexiteers will feel utterly betrayed. The cold war will become hotter: as big a disaster for the economy, and hence science, as any no-deal scenario.

We are in a terrible impasse. The lack of smart people listening to the needs of the country, let alone science, in our populist government terrifies me even more. Three years ago, the then prime minister Theresa May had a chance to make a truce between the warring parties. She could have offered to leave the EU, as the outcome of the referendum explicitly required, but also offer a follow-up referendum on leaving the common market or the customs union or both, the options never voted on.

Enacting this compromise now could lead to a well-informed vote and orderly Brexit, whatever the outcome of the second referendum. The economy could then evolve and adjust, and science and universities would be better prepared, too. This isn鈥檛 my ideal scenario, but a compromise in the search for a better outcome for science and the country.

Parliament returns from its summer recess on 3 September, with barely eight weeks to find a compromise. But all parties to the debate are just hardening their positions. It seems that only when the economy is in ruins and everyone is worn down will they be ready for a compromise 鈥� the way civil wars tend to end. The sooner we realise there will be no winners, the better. Optimism, even baseless, is always loved but helps only political careers. Compromises and U-turns are decried, but get things sorted.