Jim Ratcliffe is best known as the unpopular Manchester United owner and today he has been in the news for saying that 'the UK has been colonised by immigrants'. We need to understand Ratcliffe's as an energy billionaire who made his power and money by closing workplaces and opposing unions 🧵

Have seen this take a lot and really disagree. Gov’t could invest in anchor institutions for towns; build FE colleges in town centres; set up childcare co-ops; retrofit iconic buildings and make them into community gyms, etc. We are more than individual consumers - that’s the point of politics!

This is completely shocking. The police and CPS prosecuted a woman for allegedly making up rape allegation, despite strong evidence that she had been raped. It should have ended people's careers. It hasn't. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Have seen a few people passing around this story by Tom Stoppard from just last year, talking about how he learned he was Jewish and also much about his family history, and it's quite a read. He really knew how to write. www.huntingtontheatre.org/2024/09/11/t...

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Is Melinda Cooper my favourite social theorist producing work today? I think the answer is yes - and you should listen to this two-parter to find out why she should be yours, too.

Very happy with this!

This @renewaljournal.bsky.social essay is so brilliant - the history of the British far right narrated entirely through its activities in Croydon. Every sentence makes it clear it was written by a scholar with a genuine love for history and for Croydon. renewal.org.uk/articles/sub...

The opening paragraphs - it's like, I don't know, Shakespeare, or Beethoven. You know it's great. Everyone knows it's great. But then you encounter it directly, in its own context, and you can only say, man this is so great.

So much talk about Reform voters, but I'm yet to read much about their lives beyond tropes and excuses ('legitimate concerns'). I've been back in the midlands to interview people and learn more. Here's my piece on them and Reform's attempts to present itself as a community-minded, pro-worker party:

This event is looking amazing and do give the @transitionsec.bsky.social account a follow - I hear there’s lots to come on the green transition and the political economy of militarism.

Hugely recommend this to my fellow early-career sociologists - I went last year and it was amazing.

I've been slow to share this because in all honesty I was a little bit hungover on Saturday, but I wrote the New Statesman's weekend essay this week, on why England's ex-mining areas have become especially disenchanted with politics: www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

This is a very clear historical and current summary, and utterly damning. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

One of my most prized possessions is my mum's old copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, with her marginalia. Last year it sadly fell apart. Turns out my partner has been secretly working to restore it, as a birthday present. Here it is, all rebound, with my mum's and my initials added on the spine.

Great new @ippr.org report from @sachahilhorst.bsky.social, making very clear the link between the decline of community spaces and the rise of the radical right. Sacha reimagines the 20th century miners' welfare fund as a model for reviving social infrastructure: www.ippr.org/articles/pla...

who could possibly have foreseen

rare W for COINTELPRO from a legendary conversation between Bhakti Shringarpure and Mahmood Mamdani (h/t Silke-Marie Weineck)

“The future rulers of the void will conquer it with front facing camera.”

Contra Adam Curtis, it is not true and never has been true that British xenophobia and racism are confined to "the old industrial towns".

Ah yes, creating a class of asset-rich ex-industrial workers otherwise abandoned by the state - famously productive of healthy, democratic subjectivities

Morrisons has closed 52 cafés since March - such a blow to many communities. But imo it's a mistake to think of this as mostly a story about loss of community spirit, as this New Statesman piece does, when it's really about the harm caused by private equity. www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This is like reading one of those horrific VAW miscarriages of justice from 30 years ago www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

How researchers at Bocconi guessed the Pope using network analysis ⬇️ www.unibocconi.it/en/news/netw...

When I was living in Mansfield, 'corruption' was one of the main ways of understanding politics. Not ideology, not policy - because 'it's all lies anyway'. It is no coincidence that this frame thrives especially in ex-mining communities. Here I trace the connection between the two.

I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive the ghouls who are doing this to my friends.

This will be fun - come join if you can

Here’s an interesting insight in how Reform UK does local politics. This is Farage and Anderson in front of the newly restored winding wheels of Silverhill colliery, which have recently been made into a monument.

As Amelia writes, “Work cannot help but change the most basic material stuff of people’s lives… In societies in which people sell their labour to live, one in which paid work is the basis for meeting most needs, what life is like will depend significantly on what work is like.”

“Perhaps worst of all, the government is claiming that military spending is Britain’s economic salvation while wearing fiscal handcuffs of its own making.” Khem Rogaly in @theguardian.com on why increasing military spending isn’t going to fix our broken economy. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

✒ Do you want to write for The Break Down? We’re now taking pitches for our first issue, which will explore what Trump’s second term and the new right mean for the climate. Deadline: 14 Feb, 2025 Pitching guidelines — break-down.org/about 💸 Paid!

This looks amazing - one more week for early-career scholars to apply.

Great piece by @neilwarner.bsky.social on Labour’s socialist alternatives to Thatcherism in the 1970s. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/lab...

How did Britain's post-industrial towns become hubs of badly paid work and disenchanted politics? They were not forgotten or 'left behind', but actively remade. My report for @cmmonwealth.bsky.social two-towns.common-wealth.org