The UK state is dumping its responsibilities on our doorsteps, while green-lighting policies that lead us closer to crisis

Would you mind fixing the NHS? And while you’re at it, could you please build an anti-missile system in your garden? Then regulate the banks, replace the water mains, tax the very rich and use the proceeds to rebuild our schools. Well, come on people: what are you waiting for?

I exaggerate, but this isn’t very far from the approach taken by the government’s Prepare campaign. Crucial functions, way beyond the scope of individual action, are dumped on our doorsteps while those in power fail to act. As a result, our national resilience is arguably lower than at any time since the second world war. At the Labour conference last week, Andy Burnham promised “a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again”. To make good on that pledge, he will have to change almost everything.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

It used to be quite normal to pop next door for a coffee or invite friends over for dinner. But not any more. What’s behind this change – and just how damaging is it?

‘I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out. “I can’t host and cook at the same time, so if I have people over it will usually be a cold buffet I have made earlier. There are so many really nice restaurants where I live that I’d prefer to go out and try something new than make an old favourite at home.”

Personally, I’d never say no to a cold buffet – but Rehanna’s story is not unusual. In the US, the number of people who regularly host friends or family fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026 – a 70% drop over the last 50 years. In the UK, the numbers are not much better: last year, a poll of 2,000 adults found that more than four in 10 British people avoid hosting at home due to the clean-up it requires. And while chef Nigella Lawson is back on TV screens demonstrating her culinary prowess on The Great British Bake Off, it wasn’t long ago that the self-proclaimed domestic goddess revealed even she had “got out of the habit” of hosting formal dinner parties.

Peeing in the sink he shared with Derek Jacobi, making a badger video with Brian May, climbing Everest with Alan Hinkes … as the great actor blasts into his 90s, stars celebrate his ‘loudness and madness’

Emma Thompson

The Norwegian government has given a permit to a mining company to release waste into Førde fjord despite a 17-year battle by campaigners and a supreme court ruling against it

Shortly after the Norwegian stock market closed on 17 June 2026, a few dozen local people from the small west coast town of Vevring crowded around a laptop in a school. Surrounded by children’s drawings and windows looking out over Førde fjord, they listened as news arrived from Oslo. Norway’s supreme court had ruled against its government: a permit to release mining waste directly into the fjord two miles upstream was illegal, the court said.

The moment marked the end of a 17-year fight, one of Norway’s most protracted environmental battles in living memory. In Oslo, Ingvild Fonn Asmervik, the project leader for Naturvernforbundet (Friends of the Earth Norway), compared the joy she felt to giving birth to her child. For Anne-Line Thingnes Førsund, a third-generation fisher living on the banks of the fjord in Vevring and a volunteer for the charity’s local branch, it was more of a relief. Like a mountain lifting off her shoulders, she said.

People tell of lives changed beyond recognition after the 7 October attacks by Hamas three years ago and the subsequent Israeli offensive

Ahmed Ishtaiwi has six chairs. They are cheap and plastic and battered, but they are among the 43-year-old driver and mechanic’s most valuable possessions.

After his mother died, Otto became convinced he’d been wronged by the forensic investigators – and that one of them was a fraud. The truth was even stranger

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm.

Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. He described the course of that night to me. He woke to the sound of her short breath and tried to sit her upright. Her eyes were shut, and her lips pursed. She stopped breathing. Otto reached for his phone to call for help, but then Doria opened her eyes and stared into his. She smiled, drew one last deep breath, shut her eyes again, and lay still.

Teddy Young, 24, from Bedfordshire, charged under National Security Act after arrest by counter-terror police

A serving member of the Royal Navy has been charged with spying, police have said.

Teddy Young, 24, will appear today at Westminster magistrates’ court after he was charged with obtaining protected information that could benefit a unnamed foreign power.

In ad to be shown before The Social Reckoning, Ian Russell will say ‘too little has changed’ since death of Molly, 14

Molly Russell’s father will tell UK cinemagoers that “Instagram helped kill my daughter” in an advert to be shown before screenings of a new film about Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire.

In the 30-second ad before The Social Reckoning, released on Friday, Ian Russell says “too little has changed” since the death of his 14-year-old daughter, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful content on Instagram.

UK and Israel back away from full diplomatic confrontation, though British presence in Palestine will be much reduced

• UK politics live – latest updates

Israel and the UK have backed away from a full-scale diplomatic confrontation, with Britain announcing it is rebranding its consulate general ⁠building in ⁠East Jerusalem ​as a UK mission, a move that will result in UK diplomats leaving Israel, with only seven to remain in the building.

The move was forced on the UK by the Israeli government as punishment for the decision by the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, last month to ban trade with illegal settlements and introduce a tougher sanctions regime against those that aided the building of settlements. The UK is seeking to protect the two state solution as the best means of ending the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

Authorities say 18 people also wounded after incident in Kramatorsk in country’s ‘fortess belt’

• Europe live – latest updates

Thirty people have been killed after Russia struck two passenger buses in Kramatorsk, near the frontline in eastern Ukraine, according to local authorities.

“As of now, the death toll from this morning’s attack on buses has risen to 30. Eighteen people were wounded,” the Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office said. The governor’s office gave the same toll and said public transport had been suspended.