warned that the world is way off—course in its plan to prevent catastrophic global warming. international leaders have been told that they are still not doing enough or moving fast enough, and that the time left to save humanity from global warming is running out. there are signs of a truce in the us—china trade war as president trump says beijing has agreed to cut tariffs on american cars. america is saying farewell to its 41st president, george bush senior, with ceremonies at the us capitol. a state funeral will take place on wednesday at the washington national cathedral. that's all. stay with bbc world news. the uk is running out of warehouse

space for frozen fruits, that is the warning from one industry group which says stockpiling ahead of brexit is a major factor. which says stockpiling ahead of brexit is a majorfactor. as which says stockpiling ahead of brexit is a major factor. as mps vote on exiting the eu, simonjack has been asking how they are preparing for a no—deal brexit. full to bursting, the uk warehouses are filled with materials, faced with hold—ups and customs arrangements, some businesses are trying to plan ahead. they are asking for the space in the run—up to the 29th of march. yes, we are overcommitted. there are 140,000 businesses exposed to these formalities for the first time, going up to 250 million customer declarations a year. this is unfamiliar. the reaction is not necessarily the right one. stockpiling is a knee—jerk reaction. surely there is a simple answer,

stick it in the freezer. it is —25 celsius, but demand for space is redhot. you don't build a facility like this overnight. for those scrabbling for space, they will find themselves out of luck. if you don't have an arrangement in place you will be disappointed. we are talking to customers about how to find ways to customers about how to find ways to prioritise the product ranges to make sure we have the range for a period of days or months. storage is not an option for some businesses. this chocolate maker says he feels stuck between being able to do nothing or doing something more drastic. we can't go and buy £20 of cocoa at £100,000. we don't have that much money in the bank. tons of cream will go off. we can't do very much. in terms of the big picture,

we could move the facility to slovakia and we have been over to look at properties. that would be massive for you, moving? you hit the nail on the head. i am so proud to bea nail on the head. i am so proud to be a small uk business that ma nufa ctu res be a small uk business that manufactures at exports. we are at the business end of brexit and most companies' greatest fear is we end up companies' greatest fear is we end up with what no one wants, falling out of the eu with no deal. the probability of that is out of their hands. all eyes on the business world a re hands. all eyes on the business world are now on westminster. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i am stephen sackur. what gives each of us our sense of who we are? at the most personal level we have our own family background. in the general sense we are all of us part of the human species. but it is the stuff

in between that puts us in groups, 01’ in between that puts us in groups, or tribes, and often motivates our behaviour, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, these are the persistent fault lines that seem to separate us from them. my guest todayis to separate us from them. my guest today is kwam , i to separate us from them. my guest today is kwam,i anthony apia, an academic and public intellectual who says we need to rethink identity to escape the myths of the past, but how? —— kwame anthony appiah. kwame anthony appiah, welcome to hardtalk. good to be here. you have

spent a great deal of your recent professional life thinking about identity and how each and every one of us labels ourselves. so let's start with a simple question, how do you label yourself? it depends a little bit on who i'm talking to. taxi drivers, usually i explain that i'm half ghanaian and half british by origin and that i live in the united states. that's the — that gives me three countries to talk about in terms of sort of national origin. so you, when you describe where you're from and the sort of mixedness of your identity, are those signifiers? are you thinking that you're sending signals to your interlocutor about who you are? yes, i think i'm sending signals, i think they're, as it were, weak signals from a faraway planet or something, because they don't tell you as much as i think many people assume they will. so, i grew up in ghana, my father was ghanaian, but that doesn't tell you very much about how interested i am in ghana, it doesn't tell you how much i know about ghana,

since i haven't lived there for 30 years, and so on. so i think, and i'm — many people it would be more informative to know what their nationality is, you know, if... pretty quickly in a conversation, i think you move beyond the stereotypes into more detail, and then it doesn't matter so much that it's not all that helpful. would it be too simplistic to say that in all of your work on race, religion or creed, as you put it, on gender and all of the different ways that we can identify ourselves, and do identify ourselves and others, your conclusion is that frankly, we are all so complex and so unique that almost any label we apply is in some way or other misleading? i think that's right, because the — if you take any of the big labels, the race, religion, nationality, even class, in all of those, there's so much diversity within them. you know, men are all so — men are not all the same, men are very different from one

another, women are very different from one another, people in britain are different from one another, people in london are different from one another, in a million ways. so that being told that somebody‘s a londoner doesn't actually give you a huge grip on anything very important about them, which doesn't mean that there aren't moments where being a londoner isn't hugely important to people. there are mayoral elections, it's important if you're a londoner when the mayor is being elected. if there were a big — as there have been in the past — terrorist attack in london, that would bring londoners together in the sense that 0k, we're all facing this together. but it wouldn't tell you very much about food, language, politics, it wouldn't tell you about lots of things. let's unpick it in a sense, sort of strand by strand, and let's start if i may with race, because as you've already made clear you're the product of a mixed marriage... yeah. ghanaian dad, english mother, rather aristocratic mother. yes. i've chosen race first because in a way, your writings

on race have been some of your most controversial, because going quite a long way back, pretty much 30 years, you did write this, you said "the truth is that there are no races", and you sort of indicated that the whole idea we have of race racial distinction is a sort of false construct, that is more than anything else a product of men in power in the 19th century sort of trying to divide up the world and its races in a way that suited them. yeah, i think that's right, and i think... so you don't believe in race as a...? i think one should distinguish between whether what people believe about the species and its subdivisions — and i think most of that's false, i think most of what people believe about how you should — houw you can divide people up in terms of the bodies they have and the parents and the skulls and so on, and the genetics, i think most of that is sort of mildly off. so no useful racial distinctions and differentiations can be made?

not for — no, i don't think so, not for biological reasons. you mean because genetically we're all such a mishmash? we're a mishmash and the — human beings... so, let's do it this way. i think many people think this. they think that as it were in 1492, when columbus set off, there were these four or five major populations, there was the east asian, south asian, european, african, and amerindian populations, and that they had been there for a very long time, not mixing with anybody. and sort of, quote unquote, "pure". and they were sort of pure and separated and they were bounded off from one another, and then with the age of exploration and so on, suddenly all these things were mixed up. that's just not what happened. there's always been, as a biologist might put it, gene flow, genes — people and the genes have been travelling all the time. and we know this because we know that alexander the great took 30,000

people, you know, across great swathes of asia, we know that genghis khan took people across great swathes of the world, and so on. so i think — but that turns out to have happened many more times than we realise. and i understand that, but i guess in that sense, here where it's difficult for me to see how the well—researched public intellectual, that is you, connects with the ordinary, let's say black person living in southern mississippi, whose like experience tells him that there is such a thing as race and he is a victim of racist attitudes and a systemically racist society. what meaning does your message that race is a false construct have for him orfor her? well, i don't think — i wouldn't start with that person in that situation, though if they wanted to talk to me more, i would point out that the way they're treated there because of the way they look doesn't predict what other — how they would be treated in large other parts of the world. so that where you are in a particular place, race can have a very specific meaning, which is why i would now say they aren't any races but there are racial identities,

and those racial identities are shaped by the way people think not everywhere, but in particular places. so in mississippi right now, the distinction between black and white people is extremely clear, and it remains the case that there's significant differential treatment by the government, by other people, and so on in that place, though there are going to be people even in mississippi who are hard to place. there are going to be people who have say one african ancestor four generations ago, with the rest of them european, who might be thought by some people to belong on the black side in mississippi, and by others to be on the white side. so the boundaries aren't going to be clear even in a place like mississippi, but the consequences of being on one side or the other, those are as clear as anything. and that's why you can't draw from the fact that there aren't any races, you can't draw from that the conclusion that racial identities don't matter, they matter enormously, but in insisting that they aren't real, i'm pointing out that they're created by these forms of behaviour, by these beliefs,

many of which are false, that's why the book's called the lies that bind. but what's created by those... and you would apply the same approach to religion or creed, as you call it, and presumably to sort of gender and politics. yes. imean again... patriarchal politics, underclass politics? yes. so in essence, what you're saying, if i may say so — and this, i don't mean this to sound rude — but it's fairly simple in a way. you're saying that, you know, people in power, which particularly in the 19th century, which was very a important century for all of us, were white men, basically constructed a whole series of different frameworks in which they could explain and perpetuate their own power? yes. i mean, i don't think they were clear that that's what they were doing. if they'd been clear about what they were doing, it wouldn't have been so easy to do. it's much easier to do these things while not accepting that that's what you're doing, but i do think we're living with the legacy of these forms of classification, and i do think that all of them

have the serious mistakes built into them which are worth disentangling. at the end of the disentangling, there will still be men and women and a few people in the world are hard to classify as either. there will still be people who in mississippi are black for all practical purposes, there will still be people who are protestant and catholic in northern ireland, but i think we can — it's important in trying to respond to the problems associated with these identities and to the good things that are associated with identities, it's better to be clear about how they're actually made. but do you find it disappointing that — you know, a couple of years ago, you delivered the rather influential reith lectures here in the uk all about, in a sense, the myths and the false constructs that underpin much of what we think about race and religion and what have you. you've since written this book, the lies that bind, so you're doing your best to explain to all of us from your position as a public intellectual that a lot of what we think about our identities is based upon false premises, and yet, here we sit today, in the early 21st century, with a world that seems more driven by group identity and tribalism

and groupthink than ever before. yes, well, at least as, if not... i mean, certainly, the things i'm reporting in my book, it's not as if i discovered all these things by myself. these are, much of what i say is pretty commonsensical in the world of the sociologist and the philosophers who think but i suppose my point is that there you — and it's a pejorative term, and again i'm being a little bit disrespectful — but there you sit in your sort of academic ivory tower unpicking all this stuff, and it makes not a blind bit of difference to the way societies work, power is wielded, and the way people think. so, i am going to say something that sounds like an american, i have gotten used to that. laughs. i have gotten used to that. i think — maybe it's worth saying what i think the job of someone like me is.

myjob is to provide tools to people to think about these things that are better than the tools they've currently got. myjob is not to tell people what to do, it's not even to tell them how to solve their problems. i don't think of that as what i'm doing, i'm just trying to do the thing what i'm best at, which is thinking these things through carefully and giving people in what i hope is a manageable form, i hope — i tell stories as well as make arguments, the tools for thinking about it better. but i don't expect it to have a huge impact and if you really — by itself, on the other hand, i think these are useful tools for the people who are trying to make the world better, the activists, the social movement people, those people, i think it's helpful for them to be clearer about their situation and about what the possibilities are. i'll give you just a simple example. if races really were real and if there were really important objective differences between them, then some of the inequalities in the world might persist to the end of time because of that. i am pretty confident that that won't happen once we recognise that the way we treat people is generating a lot of the racial inequality in the world. is

well, that's a very important caveat, isn't it, once we recognise? isn't it, once we recognise? yes. because one might hope that the trajectory of human sort of cognition would be forever upward, but frankly, in the era of donald trump, i'm not editorialising about the trump administration but the fact is that a lot of the messages that come from the president of the united states are clearly appealing to tribe, appealing to group, are divisive and polarising rather than seeking out a universality. yes. how do you interpret what is happening in america today? well, i think that the important thing to see is that the temptation to use simplified pictures of the way the world is divided up to generate support for political campaigns and for political agendas, that's just a feature of the world, and one of the things one tries

to do as a political person, i mean in one's life as a citizen trying to think about politics, is to try and undermine and reduce the support for the people who take advantage of this easy mechanism, this mechanism of dividing us into us and them and to create a kind of solidarity based on false beliefs about what we are like and false beliefs about what they are like. i think those people are dangerous, the world is full of them. so you, i mean this isn'tjust about donald trump... no, no. one could also look at the populism and nativism in europe... italy, hungary, poland. ..with people like matteo salvini, whom i interviewed on hardtalk recently in italy. and you look at viktor orban in hungary, you could look at a whole host of people. frankly, you could look beyond the shores of europe too, to india, where the current government uses nationalist and polarising cultural messages. yes. so, but the point you alluded to earlier is that you ultimately are an optimist and you believe that the trajectory of the human condition is, in that positive

sense, toward a more universalist and more humane, understanding, compassionate humanity? yes. how can you square that with what you see? well, i guess because i'm looking at it over a longer horizon than just five, ten or 20 years. i'm thinking about how much things have improved, over the last century. think about the massive improvement in the condition of working class people in many countries. look at the massive reduction in racial discrimination in the law in the united states over the last 100 years. look at the increasing coming together of europe in the same moment of these moments of nationalism and putting brexit to one side, which one has to do.

europe is way more unified and united than it was in the 19th century. or even in the mid—20th century. if you look over a long enough horizon, you can see that the general tendency is in the direction that i would regard as up. one area that i can see where you would find solace would be the way in which, certainly in the western world, societies and cultures view gender issues, and in particular, sexuality. i have known you for a long time, you're an out gay man, you took advantage of america's change of the law so you could marry your long—term partner. how far can we go with the notion that human beings are now free to choose their identities in ways we never even thought of before, notjust in terms of sexuality but even in terms of basic gender, where now there is a very powerful movement to change the way, the binary way we see men and women, there are a lot of people who define

themselves as non—binary, there are others who are transgendering, and society slowly appears to be moving to accept them in new ways. where does this end? i don't think it ends. there are two things in the report where it doesn't end. it doesn't end with the disappearance of identity. we are reforming our gender system but we're not getting rid of gender altogether. i believe that over the long haul into the remote future, we'll still have gender, it will be more complicated than a simple binary system but there will be men and women and some people in between. i suppose the question is, where does self—identity end? interestingly, i'm lurching between different spheres but i'm mindful that on on hardtalk not so long ago we spoke to a woman called rachel dolezal, who is of white parentage but became

an activist of the black community and spoke as a black woman, but when people realised eventually that she had two white parents, it became a fascinating and difficult debate about who is to say what being black is. and she said, look, i've never identified as white, i feel myself to be black, so therefore, to that extent, iam black. she is a good case to think about. you ask what is the relationship between self and others? you have to think of these as a matter of negotiation. you can't simply declare the meaning of race on your own. if you don't like where it's put you, you need to persuade the world to change. that is what trans people have done. trans people have done what rachel dolezal didn't do, which is they've created a movement to allow them to be what they want to be in the system. they've asked us to change

the system, and i'm happy to respond affirmatively to that request to change the system and it does no harm to me to adapt the system in that way. even if it did a bit of harm to masculinity, i would be happy because it's important to them. if rachel dolezal could have made these arguments and persuaded people and done it in a way which was a bit more straightforward, because what she was actually doing she knew involved concealing something that other people thought was important. now she didn't think it was important and that's an interesting fact about her, but unfortunately, black in america doesn't belong to her so the only way it can be changed in the direction that she wants, and i'm willing to listen to her arguments for doing it that way, is if she makes the arguments, she needs do it with other people. in this interview and in some of your other writings, you have been very consistent

in saying it's not yourjob to fix the society, it is simple to understand and explain how societies work to fellow citizens. i get that, but do you have ideas which you can share with me as to how to overcome the lies that currently underpin our identity? i think the most important thing for us to overcome, and to the extent that getting rid of the lies helps, i'm in favour of that, is the moment when identities lead to hostility and hatred and division. that's the thing that one's looking for. for that i think some things can be said but these are things known to social psychologists. one is don't close yourself off. people who live with diverse identities tend to be less bigoted than people who don't, so don't allow yourself to be channelled off into a world in which you only are among white people, only among catholics, only among straight people and so on, open your social experience to people of all the major kinds,

and do things with them that are not about race or religion or sexuality but are about soccer, or about going to the movies or about building something in your community together. work together with people, because i think people working together with people of diverse identities makes the identity less dangerous and frankly, if you have false ideas about them, as long as the ideas aren't leading you to behave badly, i'm not so worried about them. people have false ideas about everything, we have false ideas about cooking. if it doesn't do too much harm, i'm not too worried about it. finally, we have a thinker and writer in the united kingdom called david goodhart who says, these days, the most important distinction and identity that one can use when looking at people in western societies is between those he calls anywheres and those he calls somewheres. now, the anywheres are usually educated, usually metropolitan,

highly mobile people, who are comfortable in any intellectual environment, living pretty much anywhere in the world. that would be you. the somewheres are deeply rooted people who are not so mobile, whose thought processes are more localised and not so open and they, according to david goodhart, are much less interested in the kind of ideals that you've just been painting with me. i am happy to live in a world with the somewheres, i just don't want them shaping the world for the rest of us in a way that makes it very difficult for us to do what we want to do. so if, my favourite example of this is the american example of the amish in pennsylvania, they've closed themselves off, they don't like talking to strangers, they don't like money or motorcars, or lots of things that i think are inevitable parts of the modern world and they've made a world for themselves. they are entitled to that, theirfreedom is as important

as anybody else's freedom, and they don't do any harm to the rest of us, they don't go out into the world campaigning against the others, they just live separately. i don't mind that. i think if you want to be a somewhere like that, that's fine, but if you want to be the kind of somewhere that takes over the united states or britain and turn it into a country of somewheres, then i am on the other side from you. i'm a live and let live kind of person, i understand the attractions of locality, i remember the pleasures of my grandmother's english village, minchinhampton in gloucestershire, it's a lovely place and a perfectly decent life living there all the time, mostly hanging out with people from the minchinhampton. it's not the life i have chosen and for those who do, that's fine, but i don't think they should shape a world in which what i want to do is impossible. and we have to end there. but antony appiah, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. good. very nice to talk to you. thank you very much indeed. hello.

a quieter, colder spell of weather for tuesday, but then the weather gets more active again from midweek. where the, windier, but also moulded her time. in where the, windier, but also moulded hertime. ina where the, windier, but also moulded her time. in a gap between weather systems. —— wetter. in that gap between weather systems, tuesday starting the widespread frost, the most widespread frost of the week. -6 most widespread frost of the week. —6 in higher in scotland, if you missed an fog patches around as well. the risk of ice nontraded services to northern and western scotland. —— and that surfaces. ——

born. it is cold for most, a run. that increasing at about next weather system coming in towards the south—west, giving some rain in the far south—west of england. tuesday at evening and night, slowly moving northwards across england, wales, and into northern ireland. ahead of that weather system to the north of it, temperatures will drop away again for it, temperatures will drop away againfora it, temperatures will drop away again for a frost, if you fog patches, and again it is coldest in higher in scotland. —6, —7 as wednesday begins. it is less cold we get the rain coming in. still some uncertainty about how far north the wet weather will get. should it get that far north, northern scotland pretty well staying dry on wednesday in sunny. rain clearing from northern ireland that hang around much of england and wales as it slides its way eastwards in a big range of temperatures from north to south across the uk but turning milder reticulin across parts of england and wales once again. though

the weather front is close by on thursday, expect a good deal of cloud, some up weeks of rain. the end the week, deepening area of low pressure friday. across what looks like the northern part of the uk and this is really going to see the strongest winds, potentially disruptive winds, with gales and severe gales intentionally affecting scotland, northern england, northern ireland, and north sea coasts. for the rest of the week out of the cold, quieter interlude, wet and windy at times, potentially stormy to end the week but it will be turning milderfor time. that is the latest forecast. —— a time. i'm rico hizon in singapore, the headlines:

a warning our planet's future is in jeopardy at a crucial summit on climate change, with a call to action from the bbc presenter and naturalist david attenborough. if we don't take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. washington mourns for a former president, as the body of george bush senior arrives in the capital where it will lie in state. i'm ben bland in london. also in the programme: