Excellent piece. Denmark 'serves as a warning that you cannot win over anti-immigration voters without simultaneously losing those who are pro-immigration. In a less flexible party system than the Danish one, this can be catastrophic'. 1/

'On humanities courses, *I’m told*, professors often assign shorter books or no books at all, preferring to work from videos or handouts' (emphasis added). There's so much wrong with this sentence that I don't even know where to start. The whole article is like this.

Quite. Amplifying a claim (however bogus & irresponsible) is to give credence to the claim, and - in this case - it's not even a claim that is being made beyond the US. The line should have been drawn under pseudo-scientific claims about autism when the GMC found against Andrew Wakefield in 2010.

What is the liberalizing potential of higher education? In this @bjsociology.bsky.social research, we show substantial variation in the association between field of study and anti-immigrant sentiment — a pattern most pronounced among those with tertiary degrees doi.org/10.1111/1468...

Nb

Any journalist quoting this absurd, invented £234 billion number cited by Farage/Reform should make absolutely clear that it has been withdrawn by *its own authors* (the Centre for Policy Studies) after they admitted it contained several major errors (1/3)

There's an actual full-on authoritarian-far right assault on science going on right now. Is this book about this? It seems not. A terrific angry thread ...

👀. At what point will they suggest replacing the memorial in DC to that woke Lincoln guy with one to the real martyr?

Today in incredibly crap data-viz, itself highly dependent on dodgy manipulation of the *actual* data, but packaged for and lapped up by gullible billionaires ...

The legislative rationale seems to be the Malicious Communications Act (1988), which looks - on the face of it - to be a pretty flimsy basis upon which to build a prosecution in this case.

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An important thread 👇

A generous interpretation is that the BBC’s Political Editor, who seems inclined to reduce everything to the level of court tittle-tattle, has a very impoverished understanding of politics.

Exemplary (and parsimonious) myth-busting on asylum/immigration from @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/09/key-...

Evidence-free assertion from a senior presenter on the BBC's flagship news programme.

My paternal grandfather was born the year before Edison invented the phonograph. His wife - my grandmother - lived long enough to hear the first two Pixies albums. (Pretty sure she didn’t).

How to make a fortune by espousing views on social media that would have made the National Front blush. Important thread. 👇

I’m sure he’ll be writing a similar puff piece at the TUC later this week.

Deeply flawed ‘study’ from a journal that should know better yields a clickbait headline in a newspaper that also should know better. Wonderful demolition job by Sophie Hill.

So, if ‘numbers always tend to benefit the left’ then it follows that the right’s best buddy is vacuous, confected, evidence-free BS?

A new paper (with helpful thread) adding a detailed analysis of the UK case to a very consistent cross-national research finding: accommodating the radical right imposes electoral costs on social democratic parties.

This is a heck of a thread. Essential reading.

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In case anyone is persuaded by the idea that Farage, Tice et al are men of the people ...

A quote for our times from Milton Mayer's 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45' (Chicago University Press, 1955). This is from chapter 13, entitled 'But then it was too late'.

Facts? Pfft.

Well, at least I have another case study for my class on 'The Politics and Governance of Crisis' - the part where we talk about crises as discursively constructed. This is all very reminiscent of the 'Winter of Discontent'.

This isn’t some operational detail about Iwo Jima or whatever. This is one of the things most widely known about WWII - that the surrenders of Germany and Japan were unconditional.

Very much this. In the US, AP operates very much as a subfield of pol sci in its own right. The case for making it a sub-sub-field of comparative politics grows stronger each day.

As Colin Hay put it nearly 30 years ago: '‘Crisis then is not some objective condition or property of a system defining the contours for subsequent ideological contestation. Rather, it is subjectively perceived and hence brought into existence through narrative and discourse'.

Amazing stuff from Britain’s leading clown newspaper, making a story about the BBC when none of the parties concerned had even mentioned them

Delighted to see this excellent and very timely piece by my PhD student Sarah Cheung now published. @edinburghpir.bsky.social @uoe-sps.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Note 👇

Quite.

This👇

Don’t miss our very own SPS academics taking part in this year’s Festival of Politics. Nida Alahmad - Peace in the Middle East? Leah McCabe - The rise of misogyny Hayley Bennett - Holyrood 2026 the big issues Benjamin Martill - How safe is Europe? www.festivalofpolitics.scot

This 👇

Pulling no punches, outgoing president of the British Academy slates 'confused, if not incoherent' ministerial (DfE) approach to universities and urges action to remove higher education from the 'too difficult box'. With a sharing link for 3 non-subscribers. 1/2 on.ft.com/4kHmNwJ

Obviously this is correct - & not just because it affirms my pro-rhetoric prejudice. The state’s relations with economic interests are political: it’s conflict & consent. Yet we treat them as governed by physical laws (as if ‘bond markets’ weren’t people). Bond markets & tories know this of course.

Oh well, I guess he must have missed that class at Wharton as well.

The last thing I did at @edinburghpir.bsky.social ‬and @uoe-sps.bsky.social, was create this site for the best blog posts from the political behaviour course that I ran: blogs.ed.ac.uk/political_be... There's some excellent stuff on a range of topics (see below). Well worth a read, in my opinion!

That 2nd paragraph in James's post - that would be me (& my tax-paying, NHS surcharge-paying wife & our autistic son). I also have the temerity to have a suspiciously foreign passport as well as my British one. This is ethno-nationalist performative cruelty - thankfully a minority preference.

'Finds'?

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A very interesting pair of images when placed side-by-side.

I had no idea that you could still buy catering tins of Mellow Bird's. Equally, I'm relieved to hear that Underground tannoy announcements are only for 'taxpayers and tourists'.

This is excellent.

Appalling.