The UK government’s 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 MinisterÌęBoris Johnson’s main EU withdrawal agreement bill, which wasÌę. 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’t 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.

“At 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,” she told New żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”.

Instead, the watchdog should have greater independence, with the EAC taking a role in appointing the OEP’s 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, withÌę deferred to a policy statement. That statement hasn’t been published yet and, Creagh points out, isn’t in the legislation, so could be easily overturned by future governments.

A spokesperson for the environment department says:Ìę“As 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.”

The intervention by MPs follows calls from London’s mayor Sadiq Khan yesterday for the government to amend the bill to adopt the World Health Organization’s 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.

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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, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” has learned. Researchers say they want to ensure their experiments can continue should imports of materials be disrupted after the UK’s 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.

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

, 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 “all around the EU”. She says she is stockpiling to ensure that she can uphold animal welfare.

Neil Hyatt at theÌęUniversity of Sheffield, who researches radioactive waste management, has ordered an advance supply of the radioactive compound uranium dioxide. “We have taken measures to procure sufficient material to deliver our current research order book,” 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.

“We 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,” says , who works on treatments for leukaemia at University College London. Fielding didn’t 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.

“We have also encouraged individual faculties, departments and labs to take some proportionate responses themselves,” says the spokesperson. “UCL’s Estates teams have been working with academic departments and labs to ascertain any additional storage needs in relation to this.”

Some universities say they are not engaged in “widespread” stockpiling. “We do not anticipate that large-scale stockpiling will be necessary,” says a spokesperson for the University of Bath.

However, a copy of an email sent to some academics at Bath has been shared with żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”. For researchers relying on small, EU-based suppliers, the first piece of advice reads: “Stockpile if you can”.

In total, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” 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.

“Last time we miscalculated and bought too many protective gloves, the boxes were everywhere,” he says.

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

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’ Council’s online hate crime hub, which was established by the Home Office in 2017 to “tackle the emerging threat of online hate crime”.

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 forÌęcounter-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.

“The dashboard flags between 500,000 and 800,000 Brexit-related tweets per day”

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. “Usually, our algorithms come in between 85 and 95 per cent,” 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. “The perception is: ‘Do I really need to come out and speak to somebody because they’ve posted a tweet?’.”

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’t, 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 “Mogglodytes” treasure. So I am alright when people have derided me as an “ungrateful immigrant” . On the other hand, I cannot support calls for a second referendum. That has led some remainers to express their “deep discontent with my lack of vision”.

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’re 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’s 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’s 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’t 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 – 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.