Of course, because this is precisely why they were put up and what they’re for.

For those that missed this truly excellent review of my book.

I am in the Rowntree Memorial Park cafe which has a gigantic poppy on its outer wall with my two year old. There are like 15 other toddlers here. We are 22 minutes away from the minute of silence. I’m on the edge of my seat to see what happens.

Perhaps the dumbest take in the last few days has been British people, including people on the left, loudly proclaiming we are too vicariously interested in New York local politics.

Its worth noting that in Britain, Mamdani would have thrown out of the Labour Party by a small room full LinkIn weirdos and then replaced by a former private healthcare lobbyist who would go on to lose by 5,000 votes to a Reform candidate who was a convinced sex offender.

Congratulations to Andrew Cuomo for his forthcoming permanent slot as a representative of the left on the Rest is Politics.

Review of @samwetherell.bsky.social’s terrific new history of Liverpool, a definitive study of the city‘s 20th century with clear lessons for the 21st.

This feels about right.

That Britain has a king, that the king's brother has been involved in serious instances of sexual abuse, that the consequence is for him to be stripped of a handful of abstruse feudal titles and that Britain's elite think this is a fitting punishment, is the mark of a truly fucking weird country.

This looks incredible and is *long* overdue.

brilliant, both book and review!

Thanks to the Nazi billionaire for providing phone service in rural Shropshire. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Such an honour to see a wonderful, long and thoughtful review of my book in the latest @lrb.co.uk - by the excellent Florence Sutcliffe Braithwaite. It captures how each of my books were products of their specific political moments. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Such an honour to see a wonderful, long and thoughtful review of my book in the latest @lrb.co.uk - by the excellent Florence Sutcliffe Braithwaite. It captures how each of my books were products of their specific political moments. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

BBC news this morning setting the tone for our coming century. Stories about apocalyptic climate-change led disaster and mass displacement in the post colonial global south evenly spaced with hysterical meltdowns about the onshore temporary housing of refugees.

Dutch friends! Come to the Amsterdam launch of Liverpool and the Unmaking if Britain next month at the Amsterdam Centre for Urban Studies with some amazing speakers. spui25.nl/programma/do...

Dutch friends! Come to the Amsterdam launch of Liverpool and the Unmaking if Britain next month at the Amsterdam Centre for Urban Studies with some amazing speakers. spui25.nl/programma/do...

Today, after more than 15 years of living on and off in the US, I had the strange experience of becoming a US citizen.

Olive Morris's former squat and centre for the Brixton Ad-Hoc Committee against Police Repression. £1.4m themodernhouse.com/sales-list/t... www.decolonisingthearchive.com/remembering-...

"These proposals would mean deporting greater numbers and a greater proportion of the population than former Ugandan President Idi Amin's deportation of Ugandan Asians."

I mean this isn’t what I’m saying. I don’t think we should even discuss reducing migration because a) I think migration is a good thing and b) nobody has ever been able to show me evidence that reducing it would have a positive effect on anything

Update: train has now been broken down for almost an hour in a field in Sussex.

Nothing like travelling solo on the train from York to Sussex with a two year old and two large bags to remind you of the decrepitude of British infrastructure and the kindness of strangers.

New article out in @jbritishstudies.bsky.social. It's gestation began in late 2021, shortly before I started my current job teaching Black British history. It's the product of my frustrations with the way that the histories of racism & fascism in Britain are written about. doi.org/10.1017/jbr....

My students usually enjoy my lectures, but I think they particularly enjoyed yesterday’s, when two random twelve year olds stormed the stage, called me a specky twat, then were chased away by two frantic security officers.

This new piece by @hornseyhq.bsky.social in Modern British Studies looks fascinating: Factory tourism in inter-war Britain: the spectacular construction of social-democratic mass production.

The university I work at it is literally encircled by England flags targeted sometimes implicitly and sometimes very explicitly at students of colour. I wonder why that isn’t part of the discussion about “keeping universities free from hate”? (I don’t actually wonder this).

This essay by @sonalidhanpal.bsky.social on the relationship between decolonisation and mass council housing is one of the most exciting works of British urban history I've read in a long, long time. It points the way to a different kind of future for our work. direct.mit.edu/grey/article...

Come see Liam talk about prisons in York! Its open to all and I'll be chairing.

Explaining a burger to a British person: "Imagine a sausage"

“Why haven’t the protests against successive governments’ complicity in genocide stopped”, a mystery that is apparently beyond our finest political minds to fathom

I've got a new article out @historyworkshop.org.uk. It argues for history as a form of intergenerational friendship. History, like friendship, can be a politically powerful way of talking and thinking across time, and can connect past, present, and future struggle ✊ academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-...

Striking and grimly predictable that the most consequential effect of Liz Truss's premiership has been to radically constrain the state's political and economic imagination. She lost the battle, but won the war by binding Britain seemingly forever to austerity. www.ft.com/content/7615...

The qualifying sentence that begins "to be sure" is doing an *enormous* amount of heavy lifting in this saccharine and naive attempt to rehabilitate the nascent liberalism of the eighteenth century Atlantic World. The ruins of the present owe so much to this past. www.ft.com/content/650a...

End of week reading. @samwetherell.bsky.social's excellent new urban history of post-war Liverpool.

Let’s say, hypothetically, you had a big public book event in front of 120 people later, and you’d completely lost your voice this morning. What could someone in this situation do in the next ten hours?

Very pleased that my piece 'Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity' has been published in @urbanhistory.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S096... Many thanks to @mctom.bsky.social for organising the roundtable that got these thoughts going back in 2023! #UrbanHist #EnvHums

Labour Party politicians and grandees speed running the British Empire by doing indentured servitude and Mandatory Palestine in the same week.

When he was PM in 2004 Tony Blair visited my now academised sixth form in Milton Keynes which was built during his reign. He was due to walk under an enclosed windowed bridge and my friend Dan was about to press his bare arse against the glass when a teacher stopped him at the last minute. Alas.

Blair's post-genocide plans for a new Mandatory Palestine should be a delegitimising project for an entire faction of Labour. In terms of scandal by association this is far worse than anything Mandleson has done. A generation of British politicians should be haunted by the words "Gaza Trump Riviera"

The problem here is the limitations of viewing "racism" as individual pathology rather than a structural historical force. Doing the former is to fall into a political trap that Reform will always win. Doing the latter implicates Labour too, as it should.

My two year old woke up, seemingly for the day, at 2.45am. Happy weekend everyone

I wonder if mandatory ID cards inevitably with little flags on them tied directly to citizenship will make Reform's plans to round up and deport more than a hundred thousand people easier, or harder?

New on advance access: "Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928" by Simeon Koole (@uobrishistory.bsky.social) and @benmechen.bsky.social (@uclhistory.bsky.social) #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1093/past...

We will all know Starmer is truly finished when the press start noticing, for the very first time, that Labour received half a million fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019. Mandleson is probably going to email the Wikipedia entry for the 2024 election to Beth Rigby at any moment.

These are all great points. I’d also add that we should oppose this out of solidarity with people who are here “illegally” and shouldn’t have to live lives that are even more criminalised, precarious and hunted.

Lovely review of Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain from the excellent Isaac Rose, whose book on the gentrification of Manchester, The Rentier City, is *essential.* statmagazine.org/liverpool-an...

I guess it's hard to know which is worse. Whether this unbelievably juvenile and massively unproductive reading of the present conjuncture/twentieth century history is a take Kamala Harris *actually* believes or whether she just feels its a sensible/smart thing to say. thehill.com/homenews/cam...

The destruction of the present Labour Party?

NEXT WEEK! Come and hear @samwetherell.bsky.social and me chat about radical pasts & radical futures💥