UK diesel prices approach all-time high

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1:27Earlier in the week, we reported that OpenAI was being sued for failing to warn police. A Canadian user was discussing mass violence with ChatGPT. She went on to kill eight people and injure many more. We'll hear what was being said. In Tigray, the internet has been disrupted as fears grow of war between the government and rebels in northern Ethiopia. will unpack Tigray's complex history. In France, a book has been dropped from consideration for a prestigious literary prize after allegations that AI was used in its writing. But how can you tell? And Pam Road celebrates 65 years of the BBC's Songs of Praise programme and its older Welsh inspiration.

2:08Here in the UK, diesel prices are creeping close to£2 per litre tonight. In France,€2 a litre has already been reached. From Monday, Italy's state-controlled energy company will cap pump prices for at least a month. It'll charge no more than€2.19 for a litre of diesel. The fallout from the US war with Iran continues to drive up costs worldwide. The UK average cost per litre on Friday has been close to the all-time high of 199.09 pence, which was recorded in June 2022 following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine that spring. The BBC's Olivia Richwald has been speaking to motorists at the pumps in Masham, North Yorkshire.

2:52Yeah, I thought£50 would half fill it and it cost me£61.62. Ouch. Exactly. Yeah,£161 to fill up and then probably lasted a week. I filled up in a Sainsbury's and it was£187. That was last Thursday and today it's£198 here. It's 11p a litre got up. In six days? Well, ahead of the Labour Party conference, which opens in Liverpool on Saturday, the Prime Minister was interviewed by the BBC's regional political editors. He was asked by Tim Ardell, who covers Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, whether it was acceptable that motorists face paying£2 a litre or more for diesel. But it's something that obviously is not completely, indeed, barely in our control.

3:42Obviously, it's driven by world events and the supply of fuel or the restriction on the supply of fuel in the Middle East. It's why we need to bring that situation to an end as quickly as possible. We will do what we can within the resources that we've got to support people at the budget. Well, I've been talking to David McWilliams, who is sales director for a large West Midlands based freight company, BJS Haulage. David told me how increased fuel prices have impacted his business. At the moment we run 140, 145 HEV vehicles and 350 LGV vehicles, which are large vans as part of the wider group of companies.

4:23Our weekly fuel bill has risen to over£200 ,000 a week, a 35 % increase since February. It's been up quite substantially in the last week or so, and our fuel prices went up from 150s up into the 160s. Plus VAT is taking into the 190s. And that's a UK national average fuel price. Some localised prices now are over£2 per litre. Right. The highest we've ever seen. How do you deal with that? Do you have to absorb that or do you pass it on? And if so, how do you pass it on? Everybody's feeling the pressure at the moment. And BGS is a business. We'll try and absorb as much as we can until we get to a stage where we've got to go to the customer and say, we need to increase your fuel.

5:07and we actually put a fuel supplement onto every single load that we do at the moment. Not because we want to, because we've got to. It's not money in our pocket. It's actually money that's going to buy fuel. Who are your main sorts of customers? So our main customers are the big retailers, the big online retailers that are selling furniture and selling food and drinks and all sorts of things in day-to-day business. You'll find that most of the products we're using on a daily basis actually move on trucks at some stage in their life. A 35 % increase on the price of fuel, diesel fuel, has gone to affect us all in the longer run.

5:48The Prime Minister said in an interview with the BBC today that although he understands very much the fear and frustration that people have about rising energy prices, there's actually nothing the government can do about it. In the beginning of the year, in February 2026, we as a nation were paying£1.30,£1.31 for fuel, for diesel fuel and paying the tax on£1.30. Now we're paying£1.60,£1.65. The tax on£1.65 is a lot more, the VAT is a lot more on£1.65 than it is on£1.30. So the Prime Minister has been very diplomatic when he says things like this. So in other words, from your point of view, if fuel isn't going to get any cheaper because of factors that genuinely are beyond our control as a country, there is one thing that government could do something about, and that's the amount of taxation that's added to the cost of fuel.

6:42Absolutely. And I'm not going to say it's a stealth tax, but it's something that people don't realise. If the price of fuel goes up by 30, 40p per litre, the government is going to take more tax on every single litre of fuel that we're buying. So refund the VAT back to where we were in February, and help the nation out. David McWilliams from BJS Haulage. We asked the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to respond to concerns about the increasing cost of diesel. It told us, we have a diverse and resilient supply. We continue to engage with our international partners and the UK fuel industry.

7:19Well, that supply might become less diverse if President Trump decides to impose a 90-day ban on US exports of diesel ahead of the country's midterm elections, something he is reported to be considering. Ellen Fraser is an energy analyst and partner with the global consulting firm Boringa. She joins us now. Ellen, thanks very much for being with us on The World tonight. Can you give us an idea of how exposed the UK in particular is to diesel price rises? Yeah, so when we look at the overall, I mean, fundamentally, it comes down to how much refining capacity we have here and how much we import of refined diesel versus how much we produce ourselves.

8:00And actually with petrol, interestingly, we're a net exporter. So provided we can get the crude oil into the country, our refining capacity and the way that the refineries are tuned means that we've actually got more than we need. Diesel, however, is a different story. We don't produce everything that we need. And actually, we have to import more than 50 percent of the diesel that we use. So it's quite significant in terms of sourcing that diesel from international markets. A good chunk of that comes from the USA. More of it comes from Europe, and obviously that's a very proximate market. It's much more sensible to buy it from geographies that are closer to us.

8:36But certainly Trump making noises about banning exports has caused the market to get quite jittery. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to be specific, but can you have this idea of what you think might be the impact here if President Trump went ahead and did just that? Yeah, it's incredibly hard to predict. And, you know, ultimately, if we even think about what's happened from a crude oil standpoint, we saw Iran predicting right at the beginning of all of this that actually, you know, crude oil might go up to 200 bucks a barrel. And we've seen nothing like that. So I think that the reassurance for folks who are listening to this is that actually the energy system has proven to be a lot more resilient than a lot of energy analysts predicted at the beginning of this.

9:19So it's not as bad as some people feared it could be, but it's still quite bad. Yeah, exactly. I mean,£2.30 per litre has been mentioned by some analysts. And, you know, when you think about what diesel prices have done in the last few weeks, you know, I've seen prices round about 170 not that long ago. We've gone up 30 pence per litre even in the last few weeks. And could that same 30 pence increase happen again in the next few weeks? It's not beyond the imagination to see that. For President Trump, the risk is presumably that if he slaps on an export ban, then other countries retaliate and some of them America actually imports diesel from.

9:59Yeah, exactly that. And actually, you know, I think it would be an act of self-harm for the American government to actually go ahead with this. And therefore, you know, I'm hopeful that common sense prevails. But actually, some markets use American diesel, but actually other places that aren't quite as accessible for diesel that's coming out of the refineries of the US actually import from other countries. So, yeah, they would see quite big price increases. We've lost 14 refineries since the 1970s, five of them since 2000. Grangemouth and Lindsay closed just last year. Is that exacerbating the situation we're now facing here?

10:34Yeah, it absolutely is. And, you know, the beginning of summer, there was a huge amount of concern over jet as well. Jet fuel, you know, we were all very worried that actually, were we going to get away for our summer holidays? And again, the market proved to be quite resilient. But certainly having refinery capacity that is anchored here in the UK creates, you know, a bit more resilience in the UK energy system. So we have left ourselves exposed, unfortunately, by losing some of those refineries. Ellen Fraser of Boringa, thanks so much for joining us on The World Tonight. On Tuesday's programme, Julian Warwicker spoke to a minister in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

11:10The government there is suing OpenAI, the company, for failing to warn police that a teenage internet user was engaging in violent exchanges with its AI chatbot called ChatGPT, even though OpenAI blocked her account for precisely that reason. Jessie Van Rotsala from Tumblr Ridge immediately opened a second account and carried on discussing her violent fantasies. Months later, on 10 February this year, she killed her mother and younger brother, then drove to her former school, where she killed six people and injured 27 others before shooting herself. She was 18 years old. The school has since been pulled down.

11:51Nikki Sharma, the Attorney General for British Columbia, told us that OpenAI needed to explain why Van Rotzala's account was closed, yet its content did not meet the company's own criteria for referral to the police. What are the safety protocols that we think are mandatory or important for reporting when there is a threat to public harm? What are the design standards that AI needs to have in place in order to prevent these types of harms? Now, to be clear, I haven't seen the chats between the shooter and the Chachapiti, and I've asked for their release, and they refused. But they were so alarming at some point that it caused this kind of internal conflict.

12:34And so I think people everywhere are asking questions about AI safety and what we should expect from those systems, including CEOs themselves. So in order to seek those answers and a level of accountability, I've decided that we should pursue legal action. That's the Attorney General in British Columbia, Nikki Sharma. Mark Folman, National Affairs Editor at the news magazine Mother Jones, says he has seen some of the killer's exchanges with ChatGPT. In the last 24 hours, he published a story detailing what he learned. Until now, there's really been no public information about the contents of those chats in the Tumblr Ridge case.

13:14It was previously reported in the media that OpenAI had shut down an account by the user in June 2025, which was about eight months before the mass shooting, but decided not to refer it to law enforcement authorities one of the astonishing things I found in my investigation was that the perpetrator simply logged back on with a second account, which OpenAI had also disclosed previously the existence of it, but said nothing about what was in it. The perpetrator had used that account to tell the chatbot about what had happened with the account ban. And remarkably, ChatGPT started explaining why it had happened and then gave advice on how to go around the safeguards to continue to talk about violence and that's precisely what the perpetrator did i found in my investigation to continue to focus on violent content violent fantasies about mass killings discussing the building and use of firearms and explosives um and so forth now we should be clear that the second account was not did not use the same username and wasn't generated by the same email address of the first account.

14:23So arguably it wasn't automatic that they would recognize the same user. But what you're saying is the exchanges not only should have also flagged up the same concerns, but actually the OpenAI's own tool was giving advice on how to bypass its controls. That's right. And then further engaging in that kind of violent content over a period of months. And so I think this raises some big questions about what the company has said about its safety systems, that it has safeguards in place that are supposed to prevent this type of focus on violent thinking and planning. Clearly, that's not what happened in this situation.

15:05And so I've gone to OpenAI over the last several months with very specific, detailed questions about their safety systems, about how the automated review system flags content like this, what they do about it. They have not engaged in any of it. They've declined to answer any of my inquiries. Just to be clear, and again, I appreciate you have to protect your sources, and that's quite right. But have you seen transcripts of these exchanges or some of these exchanges? As I reported my Mother Jones story, over the last several months of investigating this case, I've been able to speak with multiple separate sources who have knowledge of the matter.

15:45And I've also been able to reveal significant portions of the chat history of the Tumblr Ridge shooter. When you looked at the exchanges, what leapt out for you? Well, I would say that I found the chat GPT's willingness to coach the user on avoiding its own safeguards. That was astonishing to begin with. And then beyond that, the prolonged engagement in violent ideation was really quite disturbing. And to be clear, it's important to acknowledge that, as I say in my reporting in Mother Jones, that ChatGPT did in some instances push back or refuse and say, I can't engage in that or I can't help with that.

16:27But the user was able to go around that fairly easily just by repeating prompts or slightly modifying them using the very strategy that ChatGPT had advised, which is to say, well, it's only fictional or hypothetical. I'd also note that in part of this investigative work I've been doing as a series of stories over the last several months, I tested ChatGPT's guardrails myself and I found similar results. Now, in terms of what the company has said at the time, so earlier this year, it acknowledged that it had recognised there was a problem with the first account, that acts of violence, potential acts of violence were being discussed.

17:04This breached its rules. The account was closed. but it said it didn't meet the standard needed to trigger a referral to law enforcement. Are you any clearer from the information you've been able to camera what exactly the criteria were that OpenAI used at the time which weren't triggered and whether or not those criteria have changed as a result of this case? Because the company has said if this case happened again, the accounts, both accounts would be shut down and there would have been a referral. Right. And that's the sum total of what OpenAI has said. And so to your question, the answer is no.

17:41I have no understanding of what their criteria are for making that decision. And I've asked repeatedly. Right now, generally speaking, the landscape is such that there is not much regulation at all of the AI industry. And so I think there are some big questions here about whether or not a company is responsible to report information like this. The current landscape is such that they make that decision themselves. And not only are they in charge of making that decision, but how they make that decision is up to them and has been kept private. We don't know beyond the sort of broad statements that OPAI has made about this type of safety risk.

18:24That's Mark Folman. and if you go to the website motherjones.com, you can read his reporting on this story in full. We did approach OpenAI, but have not heard back from the company. It is now 24 minutes past 10. If you're listening to us live, our headlines so far on The World Tonight. Manchester City Football Club has been found guilty of breaking the majority of the 115 financial rules it had been accused of breaching. The Prime Minister has urged the justice system in England and Wales to look at how a paedophile was bailed back to his flat near a playground, the source of his original offending.

19:00And the BBC's Director General has warned some TV and radio stations as well as programmes may close due to financial pressures and changing audience habits.

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19:57Learn more at schwab.com. In Ethiopia, heavy fighting has been reported on Friday between government forces and the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Earlier this week, it seized airports and launched attacks in neighbouring regions in northern Ethiopia. The TPLF declared it was once again in a full-blown war with the federal government. A two-year civil war, which ended with the Pretoria Peace Agreement in 2022, killed an estimated 600 ,000 people. The Tigrayan rebels have joined with six other armed groups around the country to try to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. On Friday, a seventh rebel group, this time in southern Ethiopia, said it too was joining.

20:40Well, this is what residents are having to say about the situation. This resident spoke to the BBC's Tigrayna service.

20:51They were shelling with heavy artillery. We kept hearing heavy thuds. Yesterday there was a drone strike, and today fierce fighting broke out from all directions, around the Tokolosh, Korom and Sakota areas. They started firing at half past midnight. Right now there is no single vehicle moving, and public transport has completely shut down. The Health Professionals Network for Tigray helps to send special doctors into remote communities. Duke Burbridge is in Michele, the capital of the Tigray region, and told the BBC that whilst the fighting has yet to reach there, tensions are already increasing.

21:29A lot of people are very concerned about what's happening, but we're still a little ways back from the fighting. Last night, telecommunications got knocked out, and we're still connecting through one of the carriers, but the other one that most people use is gone. This is a very cash-poor society. There's not a lot of paper currency around because currency has been cut off from the ATMs for about eight months or so. People aren't getting from the federal government. So everybody does transactions over the phone through bank apps. And with the telecommunications down, this is the first morning, I think, that there hasn't been the ability to do that for most people.

22:11And that's going to be, I think, devastating just for everybody here. Everybody who needs to purchase anything is going to find that to be very difficult right now. That's Duke Burbridge in Michele, the regional capital of Tigray. Let's talk now to Laura Hammond, Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University in London. Professor Howard, thanks very much for being with us here on the programme. How has the situation changed in and around Tigray in the last few days? Well, things have become much more escalated in the last few days. As your previous coverage suggested, there's been an increasing militarization and a kind of emboldened position, I would say, of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front vis -a-vis the federal forces based in Addis Ababa.

23:03So a real escalation. And whereas there had been some sporadic fighting here and there in some quite remote areas of the region, it seems now that the fighting is much more widespread and much more frequent. Right. And the problem with that is that the fear that it could rerun a pretty awful period in Ethiopia's recent history. The strange thing that people might not realise is that not so very long ago and for quite a long period, the Tigray People's Liberation Fund was effectively the government of Ethiopia. It was, yes. From 1991 until 2018, a coalition government was leading the federal government of Ethiopia, but the most dominant party of that coalition was coming from the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front.

23:53And that is sort of the disillusionment and disenchantment that people felt as a result of kind of grievances, other ethnic grievances, other groups that were vying for power and felt shut out by that TPLF back government. And sowed the seeds for what ultimately became this struggle between the northern region of Tigray and the federal government itself that we're seeing now. How potentially dangerous for the federal government in Addis Ababa is the alliance that the TPLF now seems to have been able to forge with a number of groups, not just in the north? No, not at all just in the north. I mean, there are quite a number of northern groups, probably most notably the Amhara-backed Fano group.

24:41But also there's a Noromo group as well. And so it signals a widening of the conflict, of the opposition to the government. At the moment, it doesn't pose an existential threat to the federal government of Ethiopia, but it is a turning point in that it suggests that those who oppose government are now really mobilizing their forces and becoming much more orchestrated and unified in that kind of opposition. Could it affect other countries in the region? It could. Certainly, Eritrea is the first country that could be affected. And we know that Eritrea has been backing the formation of this Alliance for Survival, as it's called, this group of seven opposition groups.

25:29They've been providing some support and so they're already involved to some extent. But there's a fear as well, a danger that the conflict could spill over and worsen the already terrible situation that's going on in Sudan with the destabilizing features of the kind of proxy war between Ethiopia and Eritrea taking a shape in Sudan in terms of the Sudanese armed forces and the rebel-backed RS movement. Professor Laura Hammer, Professor of Development Studies at Soas University of London. Thank you. It Was That or Die, to give the book its English language title, is a critically acclaimed novel by a Canadian Haitian writer.

26:16An accusation from an anonymous online account that it was almost entirely written by an AI tool has let it be dropped from consideration for France's most eminent literary prize. The Académie Goncourt says its decision to withdraw the work by Télisson Aurélie Lyon was driven by the desire to preserve the integrity of the Goncourt Prize and the Academy itself, whose central role is to promote and honour literature written by women and men. Ironically, it was an online tool called Pangram which detected that the book had been written by AI, as is alleged, and the author has denied those allegations.

26:54But how do you tell? Sam Leith is literary editor at The Spectator. There is a definite vibe to AI written stuff. I mean, online there's endless discussion of the so-called tells. There's a sort of portentous vagueness, I think, to the style of a lot of AI writing, which actually kind of, which is why I think short story prizes are getting in trouble. It mimics the sort of, you know, kind of crap pseudo-literary writing that quite often passes for fine writing when people aren't paying attention. So there'll be sort of slightly balked metaphors, a kind of – but a lot of them – there are particular syntactic structures that AI uses a lot.