Craig sits on the edge of his chair, his hands shaking as he looks blankly at the church wall.
He’s fighting a withdrawal from crack and alcohol that rattles through his body.
His eyes are empty, but you can sense the turmoil he’s fighting.
Some 20 years of addiction has left him teetering on the edge of life and death – and he knows it all too well.
“I’ve been told by a few doctors, if you don’t stop you will be dead soon. Your body can’t take much more of this.”
Image: Craig’s been an addict for 20 years
More and more people are dying and Craig’s lost friends along the way.
Since 2012, drug deaths in England and Wales have almost doubled, rising from 2,597 to 4,859 deaths in 2021 according to data from the Office for National Statistics.
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Craig’s enveloped by his yellow hoodie which only emphasises the yellow tinge of sickness in his skin.
He’s swallowed up by the luminous fabric, he seems so small, but this is the heaviest he’s been in a long time – 15 days sober and he’s put on a stone in weight.
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He went cold turkey to get accepted into a rehabilitation centre.
Spots are few and far between and local authorities often ask addicts to show they’re willing to “do the work” by getting sober, or at least significantly reducing their intake, before they get approved for rehab funding.
Over the last 10 years councils have cut funding by half in real terms according to analysis shared with Sky News from UK Addiction Treatment Centres, the UK’s largest supplier of rehabilitation services.
In 2013, 31% of the public health grant (£828m) was spent on drug and alcohol addiction services, but that’s dropped to 16% (£608m).
And when looking at drug addiction treatment services alone, funding has dropped by a third in a decade – that’s before considering the effects of inflation.
In 2013, £569m was spent on drug addiction support services; in 2023 that funding is forecast at £379m despite the need for life saving treatment being more urgent than ever.
Detox or die
Detoxing on your own can kill you but for Craig the risk is worth it.
A spot in rehab is his golden ticket to a new life, a ticket that will whisk him away from the monster that’s always on his heels.
“You’re not supposed to do it, just stop, because you can die. I were really, really ill for four days.
“I was vomiting blood and shaking uncontrollably.”
A tear rises up to his eyes, but he swallows it back down. He says he’s just been through some of the worst days of his life and the pain is palpable.
Addicts like Craig can sign up to a medical detox before rehab, but the waiting list can be months long, and once you’re clean you join the queue for rehab which can take another six months – time Craig said he doesn’t have.
“It’ll only be a matter of time before I start drinking and doing drugs again.
“Something could just trigger me and then, I’m stubborn, I’ll just go and get a can or a bottle and the spiral starts again.
“I’ve been stealing from supermarkets, it’s got that bad.”
Craig knows he’s just weeks away from getting help, but no one, including himself, knows if he’ll get there.
He’s been here before, about to get in and then back to square one all because he relapsed.
There are thousands of people like Craig waiting for help and support workers say addiction treatment services are more stretched than ever.
The Local Government Association acknowledged “the enormous funding pressures that vital addiction services are under” but it said this is “due to cuts in funding by central government”.
In July 2021, Dame Carol Black’s report into drug treatment services said the system is “not fit for purpose” and that cuts had left services “on their knees”.
In response, the Department for Health and Social Care published its long-term drug strategy in December 2021 which pledged to spend £538m on improving addiction treatment services by the end of 2025.
So far £103m of that fund has been rolled out in April this year.
But services say it’s too little too late.
Julie Rigby, Senior Support worker at Oasis Recovery Runcorn said: “We’re seeing a general decline in funded places for people that are coming in from the local authority. Over the last few years it’s decreased by at least 50%.
“People with drug and alcohol misuse issues that are in the community are desperate, trying to get help, and they just can’t get funding to get through the door.
“People are dying to get into rehab.”
Families destroyed
Karen offered us tea as we sat down in her front room. She’s warm and welcoming but her smile can’t mask the grief hanging over her.
She told us the last year has stood still since she lost her son Kane to a heroin overdose.
Kane was fun-loving and empathetic, the type of guy that would give his last fiver to a homeless person, Karen and her son Adam said.
But Kane had suffered from an 18-year addiction to alcohol that started when he was 16 years old.
“It’s heartbreaking to see somebody you love just ruining their lives, he couldn’t help it, he couldn’t stop himself.
“He would say to me, ‘I need to go into rehab mum, I need help’.
“If he had got the help he needed, I think he could still be here today. And I think he was failed.”
Image: Karen Johnson lost her son Kane to a heroin overdose
In Wiltshire, where Kane lived, the local authority cut funding for addiction treatment services by £2.6m over a decade – the fifth largest cut across the country.
Kane’s brother Adam told Sky News he had been crying out for help but that the life-threatening severity of his addiction had been ignored.
“When he did try to get help he would go to the GP drunk to make sure they knew how bad it was.
“He was totally honest with them, he was up front and clearly needed help.”
Kane’s family hope fresh government funding over the next two years will mean cries for help won’t go ignored and families across the country won’t be torn apart like theirs.
The actor who played PC Reg Hollis in hit TV series The Bill has been praised by officers after helping them arrest a shoplifter.
Jeff Stewart stepped in when a thief attempted to escape on a bicycle in Southampton on Wednesday.
In a statement, a Hampshire Constabulary spokesman said: “The thief, 29-year-old Mohamed Diallo, fell off the bike during his attempts to flee, before officers pounced to make their arrest.
“To their surprise, local TV legend Jeff Stewart, who played PC Hollis for 24 years in The Bill, came to their aid by sitting on the suspect’s legs while officers put him in cuffs.
Image: (L-R) Jeff Stewart, Roberta Taylor, Mark Wingett, Trudie Goodwin and Cyril Nri celebrating The Bill’s 21st anniversary in 2004. Pic: PA
“In policing you should always expect the unexpected, but this really wasn’t on The Bill for this week.”
The Bill was broadcast on ITV between 1984 and 2010 and featured the fictional lives of police officers from the Sun Hill police station in east London.
Mr Stewart, who was among the original cast, appeared in more than 1,000 episodes as PC Hollis.
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Image: Police released footage showing their pursuit of a shoplifter in Southampton. Pic: Hampshire Constabulary
Image: As the suspect falls to the floor, PC Hollis (aka Jeff Stewart) sits on his legs. Pic: Hampshire Constabulary
In praising Mr Stewart’s actions, the force said: “Long since retired from Sun Hill station – but he’s still got it.”
Police from the Bargate Neighbourhoods Policing Team were alerted by staff at a Co-op store in Ocean Way to a suspected shoplifter on Wednesday.
Mohamed Diallo, 29, of Anglesea Road, Southampton, was subsequently charged with five offences of theft relating to coffee, alcohol and food from the Co-op and two other Sainsbury’s stores on three dates in April and July.
He pleaded guilty at Southampton Magistrates’ Court on Thursday and was bailed to be sentenced on August 29.
It was a cold, typically rainy Manchester evening, October 1993, when Michael Spencer Jones set out to meet a new guitar band he had been commissioned to photograph.
The weather was miserable, he didn’t know their music, wasn’t totally in the mood. “I had to drag myself from home, thinking: is it going to be worth the trouble?”
On the drive to the Out Of The Blue studio in Ancoats, on the outskirts of the city centre, a song he’d never heard before came on the local radio station. “It was like, wow, what is that?” The track was Columbia, by Oasis, the band he was on his way to meet.
Spencer Jones had previously met Noel Gallagher during the musician’s time as a roadie for fellow Manchester band Inspiral Carpets. But not Liam.
“As a photographer, obviously, the aesthetic of a band is massively important,” he says as he recalls that first shoot. “I’m just looking down the camera lens with a certain amount of disbelief.”
In front of him was a 21-year-old, months before the start of the fame rollercoaster that lay ahead. And yet. “I was looking at a face that just seemed to embody the quality of stardom.”
It was the start of a partnership that continued throughout the band’s heyday, with Spencer Jones shooting the covers for their first three albums, their most successful records, and the singles that went with them.
“You work with bands pre-fame and there’s always that question: are they going to make it? With Oasis there was never that question. Their success was inevitable.”
There was a confidence, even in those early days. “Incredible, intoxicating confidence. [They were] not interested in any kind of social norms or social constraints.”
It wasn’t arrogance, he says, of a criticism sometimes levelled at the Gallaghers. “They just had this enormous self-belief.”
Spencer Jones was one of several photographers who followed the band, capturing the moments that became part of rock history.
Jill Furmanovsky, who started working with Oasis towards the end of 1994, a few months after the release of debut album Definitely Maybe, says Noel always seemed aware their time together should be documented.
“An uncanny intuition, really, that it was important,” she says. “I think Noel has been aware right from the start, because for him that’s what he used to look at when he used to buy his Smiths records or Leo Sayer or whatever, he would stare at the covers and be fascinated by the pictures.”
Contrary to popular belief, Furmanovsky says the brothers got on fairly well most of the time, “otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to function”.
She picks one shoot in 1997, around the release of their third album, Be Here Now, as one of the more memorable ones. Noel had shared his thoughts about the band on a chalkboard and “they were having such a laugh.”
But when things did erupt, it became significant. “There were tensions in some shoots but they never started hitting each other in front of me or anything like that. I used to complain about it, actually – ‘don’t leave me out of those pictures where you’re really arguing!’.”
In Paris in 1995, tensions had boiled over. “It’s one of my favourites,” she says of the shoot. “It reflects not just the band but the family situation, these brothers in a strop with each other.”
What is notable, she says, is that they were happy for photographers to take candid shots, not just set up pictures to show them “looking cool”. Pictures that on the surface might sound mundane, showing “what they were really like – tensions, mucking about, sometimes yawning… This was the genius of Noel and [former Oasis press officer] Johnny Hopkins.”
Furmanovsky also notes the women who worked behind the scenes for Oasis – unusual at a time when the industry was even more male-dominated than it is now – and how they kept them in line.
“They got on well working with women,” she says. “Maggie Mouzakitis was their tour manager for ages and was so young, but she ruled. For a band one could say were a bunch of macho Manchester blokes, they had a lot of women working in senior positions.”
This is down to the influence of their mum, Peggy, she adds. “Absolutely crucial.”
Furmanovsky has been working with Noel on an upcoming book documenting her time with the band, and says she initially wanted to start with a picture of the Gallagher matriarch. “Noel said to me, ‘Jill, you do know she wasn’t actually in the band?'”
Touring with Oasis – ‘the journalist had to take a week off’
Kevin Cummins was commissioned to take pictures when Oasis signed to Creation Records, and it “kind of spiralled out of control a little bit”, he laughs.
“I photographed them for NME, gave them their first cover. I photographed them in Man City shirts because we were all Man City fans, and City were at the time sponsored by a Japanese electronics company, Brother. It seemed a perfect fit.”
The early days documenting the band were “fairly riotous”, he says. “They were quite young, they were obviously enjoying being in the limelight.
“I remember we went on tour with them for three days for an NME ‘on the road’ piece, and the journalist who came with me had to take a week off afterwards.
“I dipped in and out of tours occasionally – I’ve always done that with musicians because I cannot imagine spending more than about seven or eight days on tour with somebody, it would drive you nuts. They’re so hedonistic, especially in the early days. It’s very, very difficult to keep up.”
Cummins says the relationship between Noel and Liam was “like anybody’s relationship, if you’ve got a younger brother – he’d get on your nerves.”
During the shoot for the City shirt pictures, he says, “Liam kicked a ball at Noel, Noel pushed him, Liam pushed him back. They have a bit of a pushing match and then they stop and they get on with it.”
Another time, following a show in Portsmouth, “as soon as we got [to the hotel] after the gig, Liam threw all the plastic furniture in the pool. Noel looked at him and said, ‘where are we going to sit?’ And he made him get in the pool and get all the furniture out. So there were like attempts at being rock and roll, and not quite getting it right sometimes.”
Cummins says he has “very affectionate” memories of working with Oasis. “I’ve got a lot of very sensitive looking pictures of Liam and people are really surprised when they see them,” he says. “But he is a very sensitive lad… it’s just he was irritating because he was younger and he wanted to make himself heard.”
All three photographers have yet to see the reunion show, but all have tickets. All say the announcement last summer came as a surprise.
“There was an inkling of it, I suppose, just in the thawing of the comments between the brothers, but I still wouldn’t have guessed it,” says Furmanovsky, who has a book out later this year, and whose pictures feature in the programme. “It’s wonderful they have pulled it off with such conviction and passion.”
Cummins’ work can be seen in a free outdoor exhibition at Wembley Park, which fans will be able to see throughout the summer until the final gigs there in September.
“I think the atmosphere at the gigs seems to have been really friendly… I like the idea that people are taking their kids and they’re passing the baton on a little bit,” he says. “Everyone’s just having a blast and it’s like the event of the summer – definitely something we need at the moment.”
Spencer Jones, who released his second Oasis book, Definitely Maybe – A View From Within, for the album’s 30th anniversary last year – adds: “They really seem to be capturing a new generation of fans and I don’t think a band has ever done that [to this extent] before. Bands from 20, 30 years ago normally just take their traditional fanbase with them.”
But he says his first thought when the reunion was announced was for the Gallaghers’ mum, Peggy. “I think for any parent, to have two children who don’t talk is pretty tough,” he says. “It’s that notion of reconciliation – if they can do it, anyone can do it.
“The fact they’re walking on stage, hands clasped together, there’s a huge amount of symbolism there that transcends Oasis and music. Especially in a fractured society, that unity is inspiring. Everyone’s had a bit of a rough time since COVID, battle weary with life itself. I think people generally are just gagging to have some fun.”
Brothers: Liam And Noel Through The Lens Of Kevin Cummins is on at Wembley Park until 30 September. Definitely Maybe – A View From Within, by Michael Spencer Jones, available through Spellbound Galleries, is out now. Oasis: Trying To Find A Way Out Of Nowhere, by Jill Furmanovsky and edited by Noel Gallagher, published by Thames & Hudson, is out from 23 September.
It was “shadowy” of the government to reveal Angela Rayner warned about the threat to social cohesion in a “readout”, Harriet Harman has said.
On Wednesday, Downing Street released a “cabinet readout” saying the deputy prime minister told ministers the government “had to show it had a plan to address people’s concerns” to defuse community tensions.
She said immigration was having a “profound impact on society” and noted 17 out of 18 places where protests broke out last summer after kicking off in Southport were the most deprived areas in Britain.
This was widely interpreted as a warning that riots could happen this summer.
But Baroness Harman told Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast that announcing it in a “readout” – given to journalists after a cabinet meeting – was not the way to do things.
“These are quite huge issues – the potential for disorder, social integration, the public mood, and ahead of summer,” the Labour peer said.
“I don’t know whether I’m just a bit old-fashioned about this, but I think it’s better when government are making statements like that they give people an opportunity to ask questions rather than this kind of sort of rather shadowy way of doing it.”
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Essex Police chief denies Farage claims
The former minister added that cabinet meetings are supposed to be secret so that everybody around the table can speak and say “anything they want because there is this protected thing”.
“You don’t say what’s happening at cabinet,” she added.
“And if anybody asks in the House of Commons or anywhere else, what happened in cabinet, the automatic response is ‘we don’t talk about what’s happened in cabinet, it’s private’. And they’ve sort of slightly breached that now.
“So is it now a situation where anybody can be asked, what did somebody say in cabinet?
“Or is it only that the prime minister can say what happened in cabinet?
“It’s a bit puzzling.”
Baroness Harman’s comments came after protests in Epping last week outside a hotel housing asylum seekers turned violent.
More than 1,000 people gathered outside The Bell Hotel in protests over two nights after an asylum seeker was arrested and charged on suspicion of alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl in the town.
Counter-protesters joined, and this week Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accused Essex Police of bussing them in, which the force said was “categorically wrong”.