Starmer isn't Britain's worst ever prime minister, but he is Labour's worst ever prime minister and it's not even close

How to win the next election: Extracting the maximal amount of political pain for the minimal amount of political good.

Excellent piece, this.

Very few people seem to understand university finances and, distressingly, this includes many academics and most policymakers. This is an attempt to condense the key points you need to know. open.substack.com/pub/profseri...

“If you aim directly at election victory you will never get there”—@benansell.bsky.social on Labour’s lost first year in government. www.prospectmagazine...

what's that, another unworkable internet censorship law with stupid unintended consequences? the mind struggles to comprehend it

Flagging my most recent column for @bylinetimes.bsky.social in which I expressed unfashionable sympathy for Rachel Reeves, whose "misfortune is to be the teller of hard truths in a country only interested in easy answers." If only her party listened to what the markets are saying about Britain

I wrote about the social history of analytic philosophy @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

I genuinely think this particular aesthetic trend (Good Art Is Didactic And Also Assumes You Are Very Stupid) is a non-trivial source of anti-woke backlash, like unironically. It is really really annoying, and I think it has provided wedges by which anti-wokes can radicalise nerds.

Here's a very clever trick that German Romanticism pulled off. At about the time a bunch of people decided they wanted to decolonise the humanities, a bunch of intellectual movements that were successors to German Romanticism had become the popular way of speaking/thinking among lefty humanists....

I disagree with most of this thread, and I see that one of the failures of the discipline is the one-sided reading of the evidence and overly confident policy recommendations to european politicians. Addressing some points:

Y'days post: Labour’s strategic error on tax mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/03/labo... The failure to raise taxes further reflects the absence of any serious analysis of what will be required to allow a noticeable (to voters) improvement in public services before the next election.

*slaps roof of Downing Street* This bad boy can fit SO much magical thinking about how you can avoid broadbased tax rises.

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

Such a mystery to me why they won't just raise taxes. It's constraining everything they want to do, defence spending seems like the perfect excuse, and they can't possibly believe that they'll be able to win the next election hobbling along like this.

If, like me, you are a UCU member and agree the union should stop wasting time and effort on a fruitless round of pay strikes at a time when tens of thousands of academic jobs are at risk, then please consider signing this open letter (link early on the document): ucucommons.org/2025/02/13/m...

I think one bad-making feature of platforms like twitter and (to a lesser extent) bluesky is that they may widen the circle of people you end up disliking (because they're being nasty etc). That doesn't seem good for us, e.g. if it changes our overall view of how good people generally are.

Now available Open Access: 📰 Does (immigration) framing influence public opinion? 🧵 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

If the UK was really, really smart, it would now plough tens of billions into research centres and take in all the American academics fleeing the US. Spoiler: the UK is not smart. 🇬🇧

It's perfectly legit for the Tories to oppose and attack the Chagos deal. Many will agree. But when a front-bencher @robertjenrickmp.bsky.social refers to Keir Starmer as a "quisling" (a traitor or collaborator) you have to wonder if the Tories are simply losing it in the face of Farage

This is good and I broadly agree that they're not failing because they're secretly or openly right-wing. But I wonder if there's a more general reason here, which is that a lot of centre-leftish politicians are overly risk-averse (more so than right-leaning ones) 1/

This country (and this city) are being ruined by a miserable, fun-hating minority and a system of local governance that tilts power in favour of them. Something should be done about that!

If you’ve ever complained about free speech on college campuses but aren’t upset about this, you’re not serious. Can’t even do mainstream economics while avoiding this list.

The biggest question raised here must be: who on earth is choosing to drive in London, the city with by far the best public transport system in Britain? me in the Guardian on the most congested city in Europe, apparently

A reviewer suggests that I've misunderstood a view that I'm criticising. However, I think it's the reviewer that's got it wrong. Should I defend my interpretation in the replies to the reviewers (being nice ofc) or should I just write "I now defend my interpration in greater detail on pp xx"?

W for the Danes

On this point, it isn't just that technology could change teh underlying constraints on e.g., climate change; new technology is a necessary condition for decarbonisation to take place. All aggressive reduction scenarios in IPCC depend on implementation of technology currently not in existence 1/

The first financial scandal/crisis to defeat all attempts at satire. There's nothing to say

So, I recently had my first academic article published. It's called Property, Nature, and the Freedom to Roam, and it's open access. I argue for the freedom to roam and against the view that private property requires the right to exlude. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Martial law declared in South Korea 40 minutes ago. It can be lifted by a majority vote in the national assembly, but they are blocking the building with police buses.