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Isolation at home and spread of conspiracy theories make individuals susceptible to radicalisation

The coronavirus pandemic risks fuelling extremism and terrorist activity as internet users from across the political spectrum are drawn into online radicalisation and the proliferation of conspiracy theories, security experts have warned.

While sustained lockdowns and travel restrictions this year have limited the potential to carry out terror attacks, intelligence agencies have raised concerns of a resurgence in violence as curbs are lifted.

“Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram . . . are operating and taking advantage of governments being distracted by Covid measures,” Ed Butler, a former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan, told reporters last month. Gilles de Kerchove, EU counter-terrorism co-ordinator, has warned that without significant reconstruction efforts following the pandemic, the public health emergency could evolve into a security crisis.

Isolation, depression and financial insecurity resulting from lockdown and job losses make individuals more susceptible to adopting new ideas and potentially being radicalised, experts believe.

One of the biggest threats is a rise in remote working and home schooling that have made both teenagers and adults easier prey for extremists groups active on social media forums such as Telegram, Gab, Discord and the video game sharing site Steam.

Colin Clarke, a terrorism researcher at the Soufan Centre, a US think-tank, said the crisis had given terrorist recruiters a “buffet” of potential arguments to advance their cause. “Every extremist group or fringe has been able to use Covid-19 to explain why their ideology makes the most sense . . . groups across the ideological spectrum from jihadis to far-right extremists to even the far-left,” he said.

While Isis militants characterise the virus as divine revenge for Muslim suffering, neo-Nazis blame the spread of the disease on immigrants and Jews and use the pandemic as evidence of the threat from globalisation and multiculturalism. An Institute for Strategic Dialogue study found that far-right groups had published “hundreds of thousands” of social media posts relating to the pandemic from January to April.

Most experts agree that far rightwing extremists have gained the most ground, having experienced what Mr Clarke called a “youth infusion” by recruiting home-schooling teenagers often left alone for hours a day with computers and phones.

Video gaming is one mechanism used to introduce young people to anti-establishment ideologies: one new online game in Germany awarded players points for shooting George Soros, the philanthropist who has long been an extreme-right hate figure, and chancellor Angela Merkel.

Mr de Kerchove, the EU counter-terrorism co-ordinator, said he was increasingly worried about growing evidence of a link between those who succumb to conspiracy theories and those who go on to embrace extremist politics.

Far-right groups such as New British Union and the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website have been particularly active in promoting virus-related conspiracy theories, such as Covid-19 being a hoax by governments or that the vaccine will implant microchips.

A narrative is also emerging that is suspicious of new technology. People who believed the virus was being spread by 5G signals embarked on a spate of arson attacks this year on telecoms masts from the Netherlands and Ireland to Cyprus, proving that ideas circulated online are spilling into real world aggression. “Violent rightwing and leftwing extremists often latch on to these narratives and reinforce them,” Mr de Kerchove said. “This explosive mix could inspire further lone-actor violence”.

Whether the rise in extreme beliefs will inspire acts of terror remains unclear but several UK counter-terrorism officials contacted by the Financial Times said they had been referring more people than usual to anti-radicalisation programmes.

Meanwhile, just as lockdowns have reduced the large gatherings that terrorists typically target, spies have found it harder to conduct covert surveillance on empty streets.

Recent deadly jihadi attacks in Vienna and Nice happened on the eve of new lockdowns, spurring fears that extremists will look to strike at crowds again when restrictions are eased.

There is also a risk the virus may have inspired terrorists to adopt deadlier methods. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of the UK’s chemical and biological weapons regiment, said that while terrorists had always been interested in creating biological weapons, they had previously thought they needed to access a virulent pathogen like anthrax or botulinum to kill a lot of people very quickly. Isis militants are now thought to have shown an interest in weaponising less dangerous viruses similar to Covid-19.

“A non-virulent pathogen has brought the world to its feet — medically and financially,” said Mr de Bretton-Gordon. “This is exactly what a terrorist would like to replicate.”

Miuccia Prada on breaking the luxury machine and her new job share

The designer continues to surprise after four decades at the head of her billion-dollar label

“At some point what you do isn’t yours any more but in the hands of others.”

Miuccia Prada is speaking over Zoom from Milan about the presentation of her final collection as Prada’s sole creative director in July. Titled “The Show That Never Happened”, the collection — utilitarian, elegant, rigidly minimalist, with overt references to her first womenswear show in 1988 — was, because of Covid-19, unveiled in a sequence of short films directed by artists including Martine Syms and Juergen Teller.

But in speaking of ownership, Prada could have been referring to what is now happening at her family’s leather-goods business, which she took over in the mid-1970s and transformed, alongside husband and Prada chief executive Patrizio Bertelli, into a cultural force and fashion group with €3.2bn in sales last year.

In February, on the weekend before Milan went into its first lockdown, Prada and Belgian designer Raf Simons settled into a pair of plush swivel chairs at the company’s via Bergamo headquarters and announced what many in the room already knew: that after more than four decades as Prada’s creative architect, she would now share that responsibility with Simons, the former creative director of Calvin Klein and Dior.

Such a move was unprecedented: never before had two such well-known and well-regarded figures shared the creative responsibilities of a major fashion label. It was proof, once again, of Prada’s prodigious capacity for change.

“It was about a moment of opening up. I was always very . . . I don’t want to say independent but . . . I almost always said no [to collaborations],” she tells me. “We joked in a [2016 joint] interview that it would be nice for designers who love each other to work together, and maybe to create a place for people who are serious, that respect each other, to celebrate creativity against marketing.”

For most designers there is a point — usually five, sometimes 10 years in — where new ideas fail to bubble to the surface, where their work becomes self-referential, static, dated. That this has never happened to Prada has given her an almost mythical status. It is what makes her shows, season after season, so suspenseful: one never knows what will emerge from behind the curtain when the music starts.

She has made bad taste chic, spearheaded the appropriation of vintage designs in high fashion and, in her revolutionary use of nylon, PVC or even bits of garbage such as crushed bottle tops and broken mirrors, exorcised preciousness out of luxury. In designing and dressing to please herself, she has taught others to do the same.

“I go on thinking, go on changing, go on facing the problem and the reality,” she says, when asked why she thinks her work has kept pace with — and often steered — the zeitgeist. “I have a personal need to know what is going on . . . I always have this sense of not knowing enough.”

Prada’s clothes are never straightforward. To wear them correctly is to wear them tongue-in-cheek, though many don’t. She is a firm believer that too much good taste can ruin a collection, and so she’ll often begin by exploring something she loathes, such as golf or crochet, trying to twist it into something she likes. Clichés of femininity — bows, florals, baby-doll dresses — are frequent targets.

“Miuccia’s irreverence was the quality that first caught fashion’s attention,” says US Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. “She dared to ask the questions: what is beauty? What’s good taste? All these years later she continues to fascinate because she’s still challenging convention, still resisting clichés.”

It is deliciously ironic that one of the world’s most influential fashion designers doesn’t sketch or sew. Instead, she surrounds herself with talented designers who translate her ideas into clothes, bags, shoes, jewellery. Fabio Zambernardi, who joined Prada in 1989 and became design director in 2002, has been by her side the longest. Some have gone on to lead their own brands, including Francesco Risso at Marni and Walter Chiapponi at Tod’s. “Every time she said something, it opened your mind,” Chiapponi gushed earlier this year.

“The pressure gives me more excitement, more fear, so my brain is more quick,” she explains. “If I think too long, I get bored.”

Miuccia Bianchi Prada never intended to have a career in fashion. A women’s rights campaigner with a doctorate in political science, she once imagined a life in the ­theatre (she performed mime for five years). It was not until the mid-1970s that she reluctantly entered the leather goods business started by her grandfather, Mario, in 1913.

“Being, let’s say, a leftist feminist, to work in fashion was a nightmare,” she says, peering into the camera. I can glimpse a red-and-white gingham shirt under a V-neck navy jumper and a pair of antique drop earrings — her “uniform” of the moment — against a room wallpapered in mossy green velvet. “I hated the idea. I felt so insecure, so guilty, because I was doing a job that was in my mind, back then, against my ideas.”

At a trade fair in 1977, Prada met a young leather factory owner who would become her future husband. Described as brash and perhaps a touch overconfident, the young Bertelli had big ideas for her business and snapped up the exclusive licence to manufacture and distribute Prada’s leather goods.

“Without him, probably I would not have gotten into this job at all,” Prada says now. “I saw with him a new world of possibilities; we were working together and also staying together.” They still live in the same Milan apartment she grew up in, where they have raised two sons.

The early years of their relationship have been described as “volcanic”. Does she like it when he offers opinions of her work? “I’m used to it,” she laughs. “I think that working together helps marriages. If you build something in life, it’s a way of staying together.”

In 1984, Prada introduced her breakthrough design: a black, lightweight, minimally branded backpack in military-grade nylon. Such a material — plain, industrial, but in fact more expensive than leather — defied the long-held belief that luxury must be precious and timeless, something that would become a life-long theme in her work. Already, she was attuned to the minimalism that would sweep the design world in the ensuing decade.

It was not until February 1988, at the age of 39, that Prada presented her first womenswear collection, irreverently dubbing her discreetly luxurious clothes as “uniforms for the slightly disenfranchised”. Their clean lines and mostly muted palette (black, brown, grey) were a tonic to the loud, lavish, frou-frou clothes then toasted on the catwalks in Paris and Milan.

Prada began to push the edges of the austere, mannishly tailored garments of her early collections, introducing colours and designs that led critics to question her taste: cowhide dresses and hot pants, bra tops and miniskirts stitched with seashells, dresses and tunics garlanded with large, floppy roses.

Certain designs became signatures. Whereas most women dress to draw the eye up — with jewellery, collars or lipstick — Prada tends to focus on the neglected lower half. Her speciality has been the skirt — prim and pencil-shaped, or cut longer into knife or car-wash pleats. Specific vintage silhouettes appear again and again, a way for Prada to reference period attitudes towards women.

“If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing,” Prada once told the curator Andrew Bolton, adding that her work was “concerned with destroying — or at least deconstructing — conventional ideas of beauty, of the generic appeal of the beautiful, glamorous, bourgeois women”.

Prada’s contributions weren’t merely stylistic; she was also building a business. The 1990s and early 2000s marked a period of vigorous expansion for Prada: it introduced a menswear line and a secondary womenswear label, Miu Miu, in 1993, then began snapping up other labels, such as Helmut Lang, shoemakers Church’s and Car Shoe, and Jil Sander (which Simons was hired to design). Eyewear and fragrance were added to the shelves. Sales grew from about $400,000 in the late 1970s, according to Forbes, to €2.6bn in 2011, when Prada held a buzzy initial public offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

But by 2014, fissures were starting to show. For the first time since its public listing, Prada’s profits fell. Analysts say the company had opened too many stores and had missed the shift to digital and the boom in designer trainers. Its shares lost about three-quarters of their value between September 2013 and January 2016 as the company pursued a turnround. Sales returned to positive territory in 2018, and even with the bottom-line damage brought about by Covid-19, shares are up a quarter from the start of the year.

“Me and my husband, we never woke up in the morning thinking about making money,” says Prada. “That is probably not appreciated by the financial community. But that is the truth. We always did things because we liked it, we thought it was interesting, and it worked.

“Luxury at some point became about the one who sold more,” she continues. “A lot of journalism doesn’t care about the content, or the issue, or the effort, or all the thoughts you put in your job. You are mainly judged by how much money you make.”

She pauses. “Even if you want to stay small, you can’t because you disappear. It’s a machine that should be broken.”

In 2017, Prada’s elder son Lorenzo joined the business after spending most of his twenties in the driver’s seat of rally cars and is now tapped to become the group’s next chief executive. Analysts speak warmly of the digital transformation he has ushered in at Prada, and his environmentally driven push to phase virgin nylon out of the company’s supply chain in favour of recycled by 2021.

At 72, Prada is now five years past Italy’s official retirement age. But although many have seen Simons’ appointment as the first step to an eventual succession, she has no plans to stop soon: “I like working. I’m here to work even more.”

Denmark to end all new North Sea oil and gas exploration

EU’s largest producer phases out fossil fuel extraction in push for climate leadership

Denmark will end all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea as part of a broader plan to phase out fossil fuel extraction by 2050. 

Nearly half a century after the country first started production, the Danish parliament agreed late on Thursday to cancel its latest licensing round and all future tenders, which grant companies the right to search for and produce oil and gas.

Denmark has repeatedly put itself forward as a global leader in climate diplomacy, and has already announced some of the world’s most ambitious carbon targets. The country aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent by 2030 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. 

“We will now follow a different path,” Dan Jorgensen, Danish minister for climate, energy and utilities, told the Financial Times in an interview. “It wouldn’t be in line with our ambition to be climate neutral in 2050 to still explore, produce and sell fossil fuels.” 

Mr Jorgensen said he hoped to “lead the way by example”, spurring other countries to also phase-out fossil fuel production.

While Denmark is a small producer — in 2019, it pumped 103,000 barrels a day, far less than the UK and Norway — it is still the largest in the EU. Last year, Denmark also produced 3.2bn cubic meters of gas, according to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2020.

Governments and companies around the world have pledged to take greater action on climate change — pushing to cut emissions as part of a broader plan to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

Denmark started extracting oil, then gas, in the North Sea in 1972. Since then, the tax revenue has been a cornerstone in building and maintaining the country’s welfare state.

Mr Jorgensen said the latest announcement will reduce revenues by DKr13bn ($2.1bn), with production by 2050 now expected to be at least 9 per cent to 15 per cent less than it would have been.

Not only has Denmark said it will cut greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds from 1990 levels — or around 20m tonnes of CO2 equivalent — within 10 years, it has also pledged to spend $1.6bn on new climate initiatives. 

There are 55 drilling platforms on the Danish continental shelf in the North Sea, scattered across 20 oil and gasfields. French energy company Total — which recently announced it would withdraw its application for Denmark’s most recent licensing round, its eighth — is responsible for output in 15 of these fields. UK-based Ineos, US oil company Hess and Germany’s Wintershall also operate in the region. 

Danish oil and gas production is projected to increase over the coming years before peaking in the late 2020s.

“This is a watershed moment,” said Helene Hagel, head of climate and environmental policy at Greenpeace Denmark. “The country can assert itself as a green frontrunner and inspire other countries to end our dependence on climate-wrecking fossil fuels.”

Denmark built the world’s first offshore wind farm in 1991, and in recent years it has become a world leader in the industry. It is home to two of the world’s largest wind companies, developer Orsted and Vestas, the turbine maker.

“We want to make sure oil workers have other jobs to go to. A lot of the employees in the oil and gas sector can be employed in the offshore wind sector,” said Mr Jorgensen.

Some providers say demand is up fivefold on last year since the start of the pandemic

Fears about “Lockdown Face” during videoconferences have driven a “Zoom boom” in requests for cosmetic surgery and body “tweakments” since the pandemic struck the UK, according to fresh research and providers.

The lockdown in March put most treatment on hold but there has been a surge in consultation requests as people sought to improve their appearance after looking at themselves on screens, said LaingBuisson, the healthcare data specialist that advises the Office for National Statistics.

“The use of video calling via Skype, FaceTime, Zoom and Microsoft Teams has apparently triggered significant interest and demand for those wishing to ‘polish’ their appearance,” said Liz Heath, author of the LaingBuisson report. “While this could be related to personal vanity, it is for some people also an important feature of their career and professional development.”

Ms Heath did not provide nationwide statistics but said most surgeries had reported a “significant” increase in demand, with some surgeries seeing a fivefold rise in requests for surgery compared with last year.

Breast enlargement remains the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure, followed by tummy tucks and liposuction, although hair implants are growing in popularity, the report said.

Save Face, a UK government-approved register of 800 accredited cosmetic practitioners, said: “Lockdown Face has become a thing.” Ashton Collins, its director, added: “We were inundated with queries saying, ‘I’ve noticed that my frown line is terrible, that my lips need doing, or my nose is crooked’.”

The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, an industry body, warned the public in October to be wary of unscrupulous providers seeking to cash in on the Zoom boom during lockdown. It reported a “massive upswing” in demand by all its 350 members.

The Zoom boom will come as a relief to cosmetic surgery providers, which had seen the market stall over the previous five years as a result of slowing economic growth, the Poly Implant Prothèse breast implant scandal — in which silicon gel ruptured, affecting 300,000 women around the world — and competition from cheaper providers overseas, including in Turkey, Poland and Belgium.

Average prices in the UK had increased significantly over the five years, with the cost of breast enhancement rising by 9.25 per cent between 2014 and 2018, from £4,905 to £5,405, according to the survey of 126 providers by LaingBuisson

The biggest growth has been in the £3bn market for “tweakments” — smaller non-clinical procedures — which may have depressed demand for cosmetic surgery. This market was estimated by LaingBuisson to be worth £286m in 2018.

Botox continues to be the most popular tweakment, accounting for about half of all procedures last year — a 17.4 per cent increase over the previous 12 months. 

Dermal fillers are also increasingly popular, with sales increasing by 27.9 per cent since 2014. Botox, followed by male breast reduction, were the most popular procedures for men, who account for less than 10 per cent of overall take-up of cosmetic procedures, LaingBuisson said.

Much of the cosmetic surgery and tweakments are delivered by smaller clinical practices, with an increase in doctor-led clinics, which are regulated by the Care Quality Commission. This market has also attracted the most investment, including from private equity investors such as Aurelius, BlueGem and R Capital.

Spire Healthcare, the biggest private hospital provider, has said it is performing almost no cosmetic operations after being contracted by the NHS to provide support during the pandemic. 

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