“There’s a code that you don’t speak to the police, so you have to find another way to protect yourself,” says Daniel.

We are in a drill music recording studio in Birmingham. We have come here to talk frankly about why teenagers carry knives.

This is a city with a history of gang violence going back decades. But in more recent years younger people have been drawn into the postcode wars. Battles are fought over drugs and territory.

“A knife is one of the easiest things you can get,” Daniel, 27, says. “Every person has a knife in the house.”

Data reveals a shocking increase in the number of teenagers killed with a knife or sharp instrument.

In the year to March 2024, there were 53 teenage victims aged 13-19 in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics. That is a 240% increase on the 22 teenage victims a decade earlier.

And some of the people dying are even younger.

In January, a 12-year-old was stabbed to death in Birmingham.

Leo Ross was fatally stabbed in the stomach as he walked home from school.

The government says it has a “mission” to halve knife crime over a decade.

These young people are not optimistic. They blame poverty, austerity and a lack of opportunities for driving teenagers growing up in the city to a life of crime.

Devontae

Devontae, 19, has witnessed fatal stabbings. He says it’s “very common” for people his age to carry knives.

“You’ve got postcode wars, postcode wars everywhere,” he says, referring to the battles fought between gangs protecting their territory.

“There’s this whole war going on that many people wouldn’t be aware of,” he explains.

“There are kids that, like, can’t even go to the shop without having the worry of getting stabbed… it’s getting beyond a joke.”

He adds: “It’s getting passed down from generation to generation and I don’t think it’ll stop. I reckon it’ll get worse.”

Daniel

“My own experience is I’ve been stabbed and I’ve been shot,” says Daniel, pointing to scars – one on his finger, others on his legs.

He says he began carrying a knife at the age of 14, around the time he was first stabbed.

He says it was “for my own protection, not because I wanted to be a gangster and not because I want to hurt nobody or scare anybody but for my own protection”.

He says he saw life on the streets as “it’s me or you and it’s not going to be me”.

“A knife is one of the easiest things you can get. It’s like a fork, right?

“Everyone, every single person has a knife… Some people might take one out to try to stab someone. Someone might take one out just to make sure that they’re safe”.

He ended up in prison. Since his release last year, he’s been mentoring teenagers, trying to steer them away from getting involved in street crime.

But he understands why so many get drawn in by the money they can earn selling drugs.

“Everyone likes the finer things of life”, he says, adding: “Nine to five is not buying that. And that’s just a simple fact.”

“The youths don’t want that. So when you’re telling the youths to leave the life of crime, you’ve got to give them an alternative”.

William

“I carried a knife from the age of 13. I got involved in a local gang growing up in central Birmingham,” says William, who is now 23.

He says he decided to start carrying a weapon after he was stabbed in the leg during a fight.

“The only way I could still be there and not be at risk of getting stabbed again is to be ready to stab whoever tried to stab me,” he explains.

Over the last decade, he’s seen more young people arming themselves.

“Some of it is literally the same as myself – protection. Other people are carrying them because they just simply don’t know how to have a fistfight.

“And then you’ve just got the ones that carry it for the image. And social media and stuff like that has become sort of popular to be sort of the bad kid.”

He believes there’s no one explanation for why more teenagers carry knives but says “the biggest reason [is] the government. There’s no funding”.

“When I was a kid, there was funding, there was youth centres… Now there’s none in my local catchment.”

He says poverty and the cost of living crisis are to blame too.

“Parents having to work stupidly long hours – 40 to 60 hours a week – just to pay rent with the rent prices,” he says. “So children are going home to empty houses.”

‘We weren’t able to pursue the police route’

Rachel Warren set up the charity Birmingham Says No to campaign against knife crime and youth violence after her son was robbed at knifepoint when he was 15.

“Obviously that left me feeling very upset and angry,” she says.

“It was very difficult to know what to do. We weren’t able to pursue the police route, obviously for fear of reprisal.”

She says knife crime is such a complex issue that “for any organisation to say, you know, that they could solve knife crime, it’s not realistic. It’s never going to be realistic”.

A recent report by the YMCA found local authority expenditure on youth services has fallen by 73% in England since 2010.

The report also revealed there are 54% fewer local authority-run youth centres in England compared with 2011-2012.

The vice chair of the Local Government Association’s safer and stronger communities board, Councillor Tom Hunt, told Sky News: “Councils work hard to provide services that help to prevent people being drawn into serious, violent crime, and have a key role to play in responding when it occurs.

“However, ongoing financial pressures have had an impact on councils’ ability to provide services that can help address this issue.

“We are working with the government in developing the Young Futures Programme, but councils need resources to provide youth services”.

Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson told us: “Knife crime has a devastating impact on families and communities across our country. Our mission to halve knife crime over a decade will be delivered through tougher enforcement and stronger prevention.”

Two worlds will collide in London today as the UK and the US lobby other countries with very different visions for the future of energy security.

Labour will tell ministers from 60 countries gathered for its Energy Security Summit that the transition from fossil fuels to clean power will make energy more secure because it’s produced at home – as well as being a win for the climate.

The stakes are high: just the small matter of stabilising the climate for years to come, as well as our energy bills.

But hopes for the summit are modest, due to, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump.

Trump turns up the heat with gas

The US president peddles a very different view of energy security: he wants to “drill baby drill” for as much oil and gas as possible and pull America out of the global climate fight.

He isn’t sending his energy secretary Chris Wright to attend, but acting assistant secretary Tommy Joyce.

The more junior official will still espouse Trump’s vision to “unleash US energy dominance”, which basically means keeping the world hooked on US fossil fuels – good news for the world’s biggest oil and gas producer.

This idea that the energy transition threatens energy security is taking root in the UK’s Reform party, but is at odds with the view of the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, who is also attending, and the United Nations.

One report by RMI found solar and wind are the cheapest option for new electricity in more than 80% of the world.

No China

The UK government wants to work with America on a trade deal and some parts of the energy industry, like nuclear power.

But underneath it will be hoping that the 60 other countries attending the summit will hold the line on ditching fossil fuels as fast as possible and boosting clean tech supply.

That’s even more urgent as the UK tries to reduce its reliance on China, which currently dominates manufacturing of clean power infrastructure like solar panels and critical minerals.

That’s also why the prime minister is today announcing £300m to help build wind turbines in the UK to reduce imports.

But China itself is not attending – good news for rival America but a setback for the summit, given China’s outsized role in the clean industries of the future.

The elephant in the room

Then there’s the real elephant in the room, which is Trump’s erratic tariffs and trade wars. No one knows how this will play out in the extremely complicated energy sector.

Trump has ordered Europe to buy more of its liquefied natural gas as a way to avoid tariffs. Europe needs it: it’s running low on storage and Russian pipeline supplies are dwindling.

But on the flipside, his policies could paradoxically hurt both Europe’s gas demand and America’s gas producers, caught between fears of a recession and shaky global demand.

The UK’s reputation as a climate saint is not unblemished though, as it expands airports and moots further North Sea oil and gas after all.

All this complexity and uncertainty forms the backdrop for the summit. Little concrete is expected to come from it – though the UK may use it to court investment.

Other than that, we can expect little more than a paper summary on what energy security really means.

But this is all about a fight for the narrative.

And so if the IEA and other countries hold the line on clean power meaning energy security, the UK government will count that as a win.

How did one woman fool the most famous magic society on the planet?

Back in 1991, Sophie Lloyd pulled off the ultimate illusion, tricking the Magic Circle into thinking she was a man.

But over 30 years after being unceremoniously kicked out, the Circle has tracked down the former actress to apologise and reinstate her membership.

She told Sky News how returning feels like the society has “made good on something that was wrong”.

How did she infiltrate that exclusive group that nowadays counts the likes of David Copperfield and Dynamo as members?

In March of that year, she took her entry exam posing as a teenage boy, creating an alter-ego called Raymond Lloyd.

“I’d played a boy before,” she explained, but “it took months of preparation” to secretly infiltrate the Circle’s ranks half a year before it would officially vote to let women in.

“Really, going back 30 years, men’s clubs were like, you know, just something you accepted.”

The men-only rule had been in place since the Circle was formed in 1905. The thinking behind it being that women just couldn’t keep secrets.

Aware of the frustration of female magicians at the time, Lloyd felt she was up for the challenge of proving women could be as good at magic as the men.

The idea was, in fact, born out of a double act, thought up by a successful magician called Jenny Winstanley who’d wanted to join herself but wasn’t allowed.

She recognised the hoax would probably only work with a much younger woman posing as a teenage boy, and met Lloyd through an acting class.

Lloyd said: “We had to have a wig made… the main thing was my face, I had plumpers made on a brace to bring his jawline down.”

To hide her feminine hands, she did the magic in gloves, which she says “was so hard to do, especially sleight of hand.”

The biggest test came when she was invited for a drink with her examiner, where she had to fake having laryngitis.

“After the exam, which was 20 minutes, he invited Jenny and I – she played my manager – and I sat there for one hour and three quarters and had to say ‘sorry, I’ve got a bad voice’.”

Raymond Lloyd passed the test, and his membership certificate was sent through to Sophie.

Then, in October of the same year, when whispers started circulating that the society was going to open its membership to both sexes, she and Jenny decided to reveal all. It didn’t go down well.

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Rather than praise her performance, members were incandescent about the deception and, somewhat ironically, Raymond Lloyd was kicked out just before women members were let in.

Lloyd said: “We got a letter… Jenny was hurt… she was snubbed by people she actually knew, that was hurtful. However, things have really changed now…”

Three decades later the Magic Circle put out a nationwide appeal stating they wanted to apologise and Lloyd was recently tracked down in Spain.

While Jenny Winstanley died 20 years ago in a car crash, as well as Sophie receiving her certificate on Thursday, her mentor’s contribution to magic is being recognised at the special show that’s being held in both their honour at the Magic Circle.

Lloyd says: “Jenny was a wonderful, passionate person. She would have loved to be here. It’s for her really.”