This leaflet format is the British political equivalent of carcinisation

"why use google?" webpage from 1999

Abundantly clear that we are in bloc politics and that Labour's strategy should reflect this. Also very clear that ultimate defeat of the far right in the UK will depend on the UK Conservatives reasserting themselves as the main party of the British right.

Checking the news like

I once got a lift home after canvassing from Ken Skates. He mostly spoke very enthusiastically about theories of Rey's origin from the Disney Star Wars films (think this was before episode 8 came out)

Bloody hell.

Because I've been doing some work with it, I've written up an applied primer on optimal transport/transportation theory and its applications to measuring dataset distance: philswatton.github.io/2026/04/08/a... Hopefully of use to someone else! Grateful for corrections on typos or misunderstandings

When I think of the notion of 'living in truth' as expressed in Havel's essay and Carney's speech, responses like this are a choice to keep putting up the sign in the shop window www.politico.eu/article/dona...

Another one of my reports written at the Turing is now available online, which is an informal literature review on AI-generated text detection. A brief thread as I've seen some discussion on the topic ⬇️ Link: www.turing.ac.uk/sites/defaul... 1/5

This is a great point: anyone who's not been plugged into AI discourse and encounters contemporary models is going to get Eliza'd into Yudkowski-adjacent views on AI safety

Think this is basically correct, albeit some are making educated guesses while others are just making guesses.

Guy who argues this aged well because in formal logic, X->Y is true whenever X is false

Great obituary of Habermas by @mattpolprof.bsky.social: jacobin.com/2026/03/habe... I only recently learned of the outline of Habermas' thought after reading Matt's recent review of his career: www.liberalcurrents.com/also-a-revie...

As promised, here’s my review of No Second Chances by @morganj0nes.bsky.social. Spoiler alert – I really dislike the extreme, anti-democratic and counter-productive People’s Vote campaign. www.thepathnottaken.net/p/fiasco-the...

Great post. I think the biggest examples of this kind of motivated causal attribution on my side of the aisle is the notion that Russian disinfo changed the outcomes of the 2016 EU Ref/2016 US Presidential election. Disinfo is v. concerning for a variety of reasons, but rarely changes vote choice.

At some point I really need to bite the bullet and read Statistical Rethinking.

Think my lastest stuff took the [No, Yes] route -- fun exercise

I'm so glad I don't have to live in a world where Matt Goodwin is an MP

When reading Suzanne Heywood's biography of her late husband Jeremy Heywood, two things struck me about Brown: 1) The world and not just Britain were v lucky he was PM during the crisis. 2) The humanity of his eulogy to Jeremy, directly addressed to Jeremy's family

I should probably write a new essay on something else sometime instead of re-upping this one, but I feel it remains relevant whenever something like the quoted post comes up: renewal.org.uk/blog/public-...

This thread is a very instructive of example of why the short form video is such a negative thing for our information environment, not least because many of those who see the video are unlikely to see it!

V worth reading

Smiling because my book with @ghostofchristo1.bsky.social is out today! In Beyond Woke and Anti-Woke (Bristol University Press), we examine the emergence of social justice ideology. Unlike polemical accounts, we use an analytic approach and academic theories and methods. More 👇

Fear of the machine's impact on work dates at least to the Luddites, but nonetheless fascinating to come across something like this from JFK's 1960 presidential campaign:

Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty (@chanret.bsky.social) and I have a new book out: “Idiosyncratic Issue Opinion and Political Choice”. The core of the book is making the argument that citizens’ views about political issues neither reduce to an ideological orientation nor to a lack of substance. (1/10)

Fascinating thread on the enduring influence of Red Vienna’s scientific worldview.

Read this earlier today and it's a great and thoughtful piece. Too much discourse among the left on AI has fallen into a lazy hostility largely disinterested in the technology. This piece is a real antidote

Materialist vs post materialist values (though I don't think anyone sees it as sacrosanct??)

Had no idea how interesting Alexandre Kojeve was as a personality. Some highlights: - Admitted to putting his opinions under Hegel's name - Sent a philosophical treatise to Stalin during WW2 - Had an affair w/ a married woman, her brother-in-law concluded she was right www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

If you want to know what actual political academics think of Matt Goodwin you can read quite a lot of their thoughts in this profile of him I wrote in 2024 (free with registration) www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-m...

As others have said, this is brilliant in its clarity and its willingness to articulate an argument. Couldn't help but think of recent discussions on the lack of thought in British political life while reading it open.substack.com/pub/paulwell...

Mark Carney's speech really is terrific: full text is here and very much worth your time.

The same is true of Britain and the longer we take to act on this reality the more painful it will be

Absolutely fantastic piece. Mitchell is an all too rare voice of reason in the discourse around the intelligence of LLMs and other ML models

It is central to the process of far-right normalization that, as these parties grow, they are able to attract more politicians with political experience and skill—often at the expense of mainstream right parties.

Looking forward to the @williamcb.bsky.social take on this: publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5901/ld...

In the Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton highlights the fact that fascist regimes were essentially uneasy Alliances between fascists and traditional conservative elites. This often resulted in tension between the leadership and party. RR not necessarily fascist etc etc

I think I'm surprised by Jenrick's plan to defect, in that: a) I'd assumed Jenrick's game plan was to wait till May and challenge for the leadership b) I can't imagine Jenrick being content with playing second fiddle to Nigel c) Reform's ascendancy is not nearly as guaranteed as it currently looks

From Robert Paxton's 'Anatomy of Fascism': 'Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their "mobilising passions", and try to co-opt the fascist following.'

Would be interesting to see non-coalition govts included in this.

I think this is true, but to a point - algorithms are designed, and different design decisions are available.

We had a good run

A lot of talk about Overton windows after one of the worst years for out-and-out racism & hate in politics that I personally remember - but accusations of racism by Rfm candidates last year was met with withdrawal and blaming "bad vetting". They are far more willing to back racist candidates now.

🚨 Excited that "Making Bribery Profitable Again? The Market Effects of Suspending Accountability for Overseas Bribery" by Eddy Malesky, Lucio Picci, and me has been published in FirstView at @iojournal.bsky.social! Open Access: doi.org/10.1017/S002... 1/n

In case anyone else is doing #adventofcode in R this year, I've been putting my solutions in this repo: github.com/alan-turing-...

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Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Some professional news: I've been promoted to senior data scientist at the Alan Turing Institute

No real policy motive from No 10 for bringing numbers down further, but is there a political one? Our @ukandeu.bsky.social-funded survey research on net migration says no - small benefit of getting numbers from peak to ~350k but none from further cuts bsky.app/profile/robj...

Anecdotally I've found that GitHub Copilot can be an excellent tool for: 1) specific, narrow tasks 2) documentation (esp. autocomplete on e.g. Python docstrings) 3) debugging Also found ChatGPT v. useful for quickly grokking the APIs of under-documented libraries