These vital spaces have been the first targets of cuts in a nation that favours age over youth – despite being the remedy for blights such as social division, polarisation and loneliness

A consensus seems to have recently settled in UK politics: that young British lives are not as they should be, and something must be done. Our teens and twentysomethings, we are told, are lonely, phone-addicted, “overdiagnosed”, and too often jobless, which entails a great blizzard of proposals – from welfare reform to the scaling-back of university education – that seem to have more to do with older voters’ prejudices than the real-life problems of other generations. At the next election, the extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds may do something to correct that, but I wouldn’t count on it. There is, after all, something deep within the British psyche that favours age over youth, and consequently misrepresents and ignores the latter in a way that sometimes looks almost pathological.

If you want a vivid example, consider a drastic loss from millions of young lives that is still bafflingly overlooked. During the first 10 years of the spending cuts that began in 2010, councils’ funding for youth services in England and Wales suffered a real-terms cut of 70%. By 2023, about 1,200 publicly run youth centres had closed, and more than 4,500 youth workers had lost their jobs. Villages, towns and cities still bear the scars: empty buildings that look just as forlorn as any shuttered library or Sure Start centre. But while other aspects of the austerity disaster have at least been acknowledged, this one still seems to be a strange kind of guilty secret, with seemingly no chance of all that lost provision ever being restored.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Gala dinner to remember Conservatives’ most successful leader puts spotlight on who will carry forward her ideas

It is a glittering annual dinner in honour of the Conservative party’s most successful leader and, on the 100th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s birth, one that is bigger than ever.

Yet as Tory grandees, celebrity backers and wealthy donors prepare to sit down at a gala dinner at London’s Guildhall on Monday evening, a battle for her legacy is under way between the party she once led and the insurgent threat to its survival, Reform UK.

Brighton Centre
Fans sing along to debut album at synth-laden show that showcases former Little Mix singer’s appealing, unvarnished and at times deeply odd schtick

Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time in the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject to the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual. She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK until 23 October.

The late actor won an Oscar for leading a romantic comedy in the 1970s and set the blueprint for many of the women who followed her in the genre

• An ethereally self-aware comedy genius: the loss of Diane Keaton is devastating

• Diane Keaton’s style: she dodged the stamp of the machine

Plenty of great female actors have starred in romantic comedies. Usually if they want to win an Oscar, however, they have to reach for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly this week, followed a reverse trajectory and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. (Keaton originated the role opposite playwright Woody Allen on the stage.) She continued to alternate serious dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally to her. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Experts and volunteers working at Castilly Henge have been trying determine if it is the county’s lost great stone circle

It was a grey Cornish autumn day, but Henry Stevens’s tough shift digging in a field next to the A30 was about to get very exciting.

Her eye was caught by something glinting in the soil and she picked up a flake of flint that had lain for thousands of years within what might just turn out to be a Cornish version of Stonehenge.

In the activist’s new memoir, she remembers how trying weed at university brought on terrifying flashbacks

• ‘To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op.’ Read an interview with Malala Yousafzai

“Explain how the time inconsistency of optimal monetary policy can lead to a stabilisation bias. How would the introduction of a price path target help to address it?”

After reading the question three times, I still couldn’t make sense of it. I groaned, went back to the textbook, tried to read, made a cup of tea, and tried again. Nothing improved my focus. Then my phone lit up with a message from my friend Anisa: a picture of my name spelled out in Scrabble letters.

Government says it is also preparing for release of 2,000 Palestinian detainees in crucial next phase of ceasefire deal

• Gaza ceasefire live: follow all the latest updates

The Israeli government says it expects all living hostages held in Gaza to be released on Monday morning and that it is preparing for the release of about 2,000 Palestinian detainees, the crucial next phase of the ceasefire deal that could end the two-year war in Gaza.

“We are expecting all 20 of our living hostages to be released together at one time to the Red Cross and transported among six to eight vehicles,” said the Israeli government spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian.

Exclusive: Acoba’s functions split between two regulators and new Ethics and Integrity Commission to oversee others

The much-criticised watchdog that scrutinises the jobs UK ministers can take after leaving office will be formally scrapped on Monday as part of a wider shake-up of the ethics structure in government.

The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), described by critics as fundamentally toothless, has been closed, a Cabinet Office announcement said, with its functions taken over by two existing regulators.

A 2% blend of low-carbon gas injected into gas grid to fuel Brigg power station in North Lincolnshire is a UK first

Energy companies have injected green hydrogen into Britain’s gas grid and used the low-carbon gas to generate electricity, in a landmark development for the UK’s climate ambitions.

For the first time in the UK, a 2% blend of green hydrogen was injected into the gas grid and blended with traditional gas to fuel the Brigg power station in North Lincolnshire which generated electricity for the power system.

Katie Mitchell had procedure at 15 after being diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome, a rare congenital disease

At the age of 15, medics feared Katie Mitchell was coming to the end of her life after suffering irreversible lung damage and heart failure from a rare congenital disease.

But she defied the odds thanks to a heart and lung transplant, and at the age of 53 she has become the UK’s longest-surviving recipient of such a procedure.