I've lived through relatively good and bad Tory & Labour governments, but never through a period like this. It simply does not matter what positive things this Labour government does. They're not permitted to spoil a relentless media assault. bylinetimes.com/2026/04/10/1...

What's most relevant right now abut this brief and off-beat account of the British Empire is Andrew Lambert's insight about global chokepoints (think Hormuz) & the power that control over them bestows: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWq5...

Thanks to @garethknapman.bsky.social for alerting me to the digital availability of the Victorian Protectorate of Aborigines files now: prov.vic.gov.au/archive/VPRS11 Would have made the writing of www.cambridge.org/core/books/c... a whole lot easier if they'd been digitised 15 years ago!

1/3 The constant intrigue over Starmer-Mandelson is exhausting. We all know what happened & why. Starmer wanted Mandelson in the US because he was widely thought to be someone who could humour Trump & prevent him harming UK interests. Very few protested at the time.

We need to appeal to all the proud white Britons who want to protect women and children from brutal, primitive men, to keep their Union Jack-draped demos lawful as they protest this rape: yet another of the 74,000 at least committed by a white British man each year: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1/2 Key findings: the poll of Anglicans reported as proof of churchgoers’ opposition to the Project Spire reparative justice scheme was commissioned by their main opponent. Respondents were given misinformation & leading questions. But even then, … alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-mer...

In December last year a poll of churchgoers was reported across right wing media to try to undermine the Church of England's Project Spire reparative justice scheme. I've been looking into it and all is not as it seems. alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-mer...

Some places still available at this workshop for teachers, heritage professionals, journalists or anyone else who wants to be able to navigate the culture wars over empire with some expert input. onlineshop.sussex.ac.uk/product-cata...

In short Rayner had to resign due to concerted media & political pressure over a single stamp duty mistake. Millionaire Tice bankrolled his party through deliberate, dodgy, tax-avoiding corporate tricks and yet the media pressure is limited to a few outlets. www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

It’s ironic that Trump is punishing Harvard for being ‘woke’ when it was planning to limit recognition and reparation for its involvement in slavery anyway. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Aporia describes itself as ‘the world’s only sociobiology magazine’. As @harryshukman explains in his frightening Year of the Rat, this is a euphemism for scientific racism. I’d hope Tory Peer Nigel Biggar’s appearance on its podcast was naive rather than knowing.

@jeremyvine.bsky.social seems to have completely abandoned any pretence at political impartiality on BBC Radio 2 as he pursues Starmer’s downfall.

From Trump's National Security Strategy. How's it going?

I see the end to 'forever wars' is going well.

Farage thugs manhandle man with pacemaker after he objects to the Reform leader's chauffeur parking in disabled bay that he needs to use. Lovely People. www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

Does it not count as libel if you put the accusation of lying in quotes?

An awful lot of bad apples Reform UK candidate probed over Facebook posts www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

@janelydon.bsky.social @alanlester.bsky.social @ihr.bsky.social

It has arrived! The 200th volume in the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series. A landmark study of the afterlives of Caribbean slavery in Australia. Come and help us celebrate while discussing imperialism, past, present & future? www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...

Order your Stop Reform campaign pack here: actionnetwork.org/fundraising/...

1/6 🧵The Pope has put his finger on Trump’s greatest weakness on foreign policy. With his narcissistic delusion of omnipotence, he doesn’t understand how Great Powers maintain hegemony. Along with Hegseth he thinks it’s all a matter of brute force. Alliances, diplomacy & soft power are ‘woke’.

As Orban’s use of Russian oil money & the MCC to support right wing culture war propaganda in the UK becomes clearer, so it becomes ever more ironic that Nigel Biggar accused me of enabling Putin’s propaganda merely by writing about British colonialism. mcc.hu/en/eloado/ni...

Very useful mapping of Orban-linked right wing networks & individuals in the UK bylinetimes.com/2026/04/14/e...

Just thought I'd bust a culture war myth. This is me teaching Sussex students on a field trip. I'm talking about what Robert Clive did, how its been interpreted over time & why his statue was put here in 1916. Contrary to what you might read in certain places I'm not inciting them to pull it down!

Fully funded collaborative RHUL-Kew PhD: www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/j5lbzp...

It's difficult to overestimate just how toxic an influence Orban has had over the UK since he gained power in 2010. Having seized control of Hungary's education system; including Universities, he's supported/funded rightist academics & groups such as History Reclaimed (of which Biggar a key player).

🚨 BREAKING NEWS 🚨 (I'm NOT deleting my post below 👇)

Turns out this picture is real A federal judge has now dismissed a lawsuit brought by Trump against the Wall Street Journal over Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book. This is a big defeat for Trump in court. It was the first time a sitting U.S. president sued a news outlet over a story he didn't like.

This, on Sudan, rather cuts to the chase @alanlester.bsky.social : africanarguments.org/2026/03/suda...

Calling out these far right networks’ sponsorship of historical propaganda is one reason why The Critic and The Spectator published falsified personal attacks on me: alanlester.co.uk/blog/smearin... And alanlester.co.uk/blog/a-lesse...

In absolutely chef’s kiss timing, Matthew Goodwin is due to speak at Orbán’s in-house propaganda group MCC *today* Badloss strikes again.

“It’s deeply shocking that Reform has developed such close ties with Orbán’s regime, an authoritarian govt with an appalling record of rolling back democracy and civic rights” Where ‘deeply shocking’ = entirely on brand. Hungary shows us we must never give them power. www.desmog.com/2026/04/08/m...

Orban’s regime underpinned the right wing networks that have been trying to rehabilitate British colonialism as a moral enterprise, while pretending to analyse it impartially. Some of the connections mapped here: religioninpraxis.com/from-budapes...

Nigel has lost a longstanding ally as well as a source of funding & destabilising propaganda.

Please tell me we don’t have to go through sixteen years of Nigel Farage before this country comes to its senses.

A major blow for the obscurely funded think tanks & private companies waging the right wing culture war in Britain too. Hopefully the Mathias Corvinus Collegium will be dismantled soon. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c2...

From 2015-18 an international deal saw Iran’s progress towards nuclear weapons halted. Trump tore up the deal & Irans’s nuclear capacity accelerated rapidly. Having lost a war Trump is now trying to resurrect a deal he broke & clear a strait that was open. armscontrolcenter.org/the-iran-dea...

@jonathanfreedland.bsky.social articulates the difference between strategic and tactical thinking: something that both Netanyahu and Trump lack. Bombing people with no willingness to compromise or influence means perpetual insecurity. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

How the US’s self-harming and China’s extraordinary technological success in EVs is enabling new opportunities for the British car industry Faisal Islam: Why the government is relaxed about Chinese car imports www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Everything @frasernelson.bsky.social writes about the evils of ‘illiberal conservatism’ is right. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge the role he played in legitimating it by turning @thespectator1828.bsky.social into an illiberal anti-‘woke’ propaganda vehicle? www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Farage adopting an uncharacteristically anticolonial position. I wonder if he’ll stick to this once it becomes widely known that it would render the Diego Garcia base rather less secret. Is it conceivable that he’s just using the islanders’ plight opportunistically, for now?

While our media focuses on events in the Gulf, the UAE’s sponsorship of the genocidal RSF in Sudan, driven by the desire to control Red Sea ports, is entirely overlooked. www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/202...

Britain needs to fundamentally rethink its position on discussing reparations. Tactics of denial and deflection - ‘what about the Arabs/Africans?’ are damaging our Commonwealth relationships when it’s imperative that we build new global alliances. www.britainsworld.org.uk/p/the-big-as...

🗣️ ‘The refusal even to begin a conversation is denting 🇬🇧 moral leadership, creating distrust, and preventing the formation of sorely needed new alliances,’ says @alanlester.bsky.social, University of Sussex #BigAsk #BritainsWorld

1/2 Both Lawrence Goldman and Martin Plaut get the figures wrong in their attempts to deflect from British responsibility to the 'Arab' slave trade in this exchange. The 'whataboutery' is one thing, since all forms of slavery ...

Hello from Bournville. Cadbury was "entangled" all the way to 1909. wa-cadbury.org.uk/slave-grown-...

Maybe it makes little difference if heritage sites tell visitors more about discomfiting pasts. Most visitors validate prior views, using the past to find pride while responding to challenges with “morals were different then” and “you have to move forward.” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Really useful thread. On this latter point, worth flagging that British anti-slavery also accommodated (and in some cases legitimised) continued entanglement with global slavery long after 1833-38. For half a century in the case of Brazil: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...