The Spectator published this attack on me & colleagues just as the High Court is considering Sussex’s request for review of the Office for Students fine. It accuses us of ‘repressing’ our students. The magazine ignored my request for to reply. Please disseminate. alanlester.co.uk/blog/smearin...

We are a rich enough country to be funding 37% of all basic research proposals, not just considering "the best" 37% and then maybe only funding 12% in the end.

One Nation is pushing Islamophobia, in its myriad forms, as its main platform … identity politics at its finest … my personal experience with Angel Marina, @AusFedPolice & @AustralianLabor it’s dangerously naïve to say there’s no harm in hate speech blakandblack.com/2026/02/24/h...

The problem facing political centrists is that after 30+ years of despised neoliberal privatisations and market reforms, public policy discourse has become functionally meaningless. Swathes of the public no longer comprehend it. It is now a foreign language almost nobody speaks.

Make it clear, as early as possible, to every DHS goon, that their friends, neighbors, family, members of their church congregations and future employers all are going to be able to just pop their name into a search box for the rest of their lives to see what they did during the Great DHS Pogrom.

1/5 Chagos Options: Any British government would find it difficult at the moment to maintain its relationship with the USA and respect international law at the same time. This tension is what the Chagos deal is all about, www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

1/ A thread on my new article, which I hope makes a few interesting points. First, there’s a need to understand the complexity of how archaeological knowledge travelled and was made at a time of huge change in the world (post-WW2). Are we really so confident in confining that knowledge to…

Stupid Australian censorship is back. Courtesy of fascists who don’t like to be called fascists. #ozpol #auspol www.canberratimes.com.au/story/917848...

Some interesting thoughts on how academic history can develop with #AI #skyhistorians #history open.substack.com/pub/resobscu...

1/2 Two things that Americans should know about this new US imperialism: 1. Empire is one big forever war. It costs the lives not only of those who have to be beaten into submission but of imperial troops. In the 2nd half of the C19 alone British & colonial … www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I am confident that AOC and I would disagree on some foreign policy issues, but I am also confident she would listen to advisors and so probably just end up doing The Blob stuff, which for all people complain, puts her ahead of three of the last five presidents and exactly even with the other two.

Thinking about the impact of LLMs on the way I earn a living - writing - and I wonder what the long-term impact will be. On the one hand, LLMs do not seem capable of producing *good* writing, in the sense of original, engaging writing (they can manage clarity, though). But they can do *quantity.*

The exception, of course, is in industries reliant on venture capital: there they hand you the money for the first 10% instead of the last. So it isn't hard to see why the LLM crowd have made this mistake.

CFP: Race, Law and Empire

The Truth About Empire paperback can now be pre-ordered from Waterstones online at 25% off. Leading specialist historians correct misinformation and write truthfully about British colonialism. Enter FEB26 at the checkout. #WPreorder www.waterstones.com/book/the-tru...

Aukus (noun): pointless wastage of other people's money for reasons you're over-confident you'll never have to explain. eg. "mum, someone did an aukus in the kitchen again I don't know I was upstairs"

www.theguardian.com/environment/... “Its emissions trading system put a price on carbon and its modernisation fund brought back cash to clean up the energy system.” #auspol #ozpol

Romania has decoupled economic growth from pollution faster than anywhere else in EU. Its net greenhouse gas emissions intensity fell 88% between 1990 & 2023, so each euro’s worth of economic activity heats planet 10 times less. Emissions have plunged by 75%. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Hot off the press and #OpenAccess, see the article 'Sovereignty and Treaties as Colonial Instruments: The British Occupation of Java 1811–1815' by Gareth Knapman: doi.org/10.1080/0308...

We most often tend to think of British treaties providing a veneer of negotiated sovereignty transfer in a late C19 African context. @garethknapman.bsky.social shows here how they provided domestic cover for seizure by force in SE Asia early in the C19 too: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

40% of WA's prison population being indigenous is a massive failure of policing, racism, lazy politics and a reliance on the carceral state. There are hundreds of cascading consequences we should care about. Liam Alexander Hall's life from now on is not one of them www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

Deep down inside, you - just like me - wanted this to happen! Fess up! 🤣

Someone left the crypt open again

Available open access, Gareth Knapman's 'Sovereignty and Treaties as Colonial Instruments: The British Occupation of Java 1811-1815', Jnl of Imp & Commonwealth Hist. #Skystorians

My latest article (open access) #history #historian #southeastasia #Imperialism #Colonialism #Decolonisation #treaties #Raffles #sovereignty www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

reading this (excellent) article generates the reminder that TS Raffles must always be included on the list of Chancers Who Built the British Empire (along w/such 'eminences' as M Thompson, T Warner, R Clive, and CB Rhodes)--harrumph! 😑

My latest article (open access) #history #historian #southeastasia #Imperialism #Colonialism #Decolonisation #treaties #Raffles #sovereignty www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

#TonyAbbott is ALP’s best weapon on 7.30. Kiss goodbye to the last urban seats for LNP.

1901-1933, Germany won 31 Science Nobels; USA only 7. Then in 1933 the Nazis destroyed the German universities, sending their scientists fleeing, esp. to America. Germany's never recovered. Since 1945, USA has received 315 Science Nobels, Germany 52. Now consider what MAGA aims to do to US unis.

I genuinely cannot believe the degree to which we are pissing away this generational breakthrough, even given the fuckmuppets who are involved www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Robert M. Hutchins in 1952. How idealistic the world looked. Something like that vision of freedom to lean and think is certainly needed now.

We knew from the moment we heard it that “social cohesion” would be one of those Orwellian terms which would be used to cover all manner of state sanctioned abuse and deprivation of civic freedoms. It fuels the very unrest it pretends to seek to quell.

As someone who recently fled the US, I am begging the Australian government to not make the same mistakes and open the flood gates to a police state through weaponized anti-semitism. This is not the way to do it.

crickets from the free speech crowd, of course

That so many of the folks who claimed to care so much about campus free speech in yesteryear are suddenly uninterested today when the problem is just flagrantly, obviously worse (but entails costs in their social circles) tells me they are hypocrites, and I will not listen to them again.

The next UK general election is *THREE AND A HALF YEARS AWAY*. How broken is British politics when you have more time left to get your act together than an entire term of Australian government, but everyone in UK Labour and politics has decided to shit the bed instead. You're all an embarassment.

Had literally *any* other nation done this the anger being heard across the media airwaves and from politicians would be deafening and unending.

Something all historians should remember.

Masked thugs on the streets. Measles outbreaks across the nation. Blatant government corruption. Coverup of group of elite sex offenders. Ruling party trying to rig elections. Leader building grandiose monuments to himself. Collapse of remnants of nonpartisan civil service. Third world America.

Follow the money. If we had mainstream political journalists worth the name, they'd focus far less on the superficial race-horse politics of One Nation v LNP. And far more on the links between Rinehart, MAGA, One Nation, Advance, IPA & other RW 'think tanks', and the global Atlas Network. #auspol

Tomato salad tonight!

On the rare occasion that I write for a publication that offers a fee, I ask that they donate it to charity. I don't think it's ethical to ask to be paid twice for work done as a salaried academic.

Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council says he is heartened by the fact that Albanese is welcoming this visit and “bringing into line many of his colleagues who are a little bit more equivocal about it” #auspol #BringingIntoLine

40 or so years of neoliberal governments have taught us at least two things. First, that hollowing out our public life and institutions only enables corruption and fascism. Second, that ‘the market’ is a source of no kind of moral value whatsoever.

When I studied political science in the 1990s, we were taught that ‘conservatives’ were in favour of property and tradition, and an attenuated notion of the common good. Turns out in the 2020s that conservatives only favour their own advancement by excusing corruption and defending pedophiles.

This is the ultimate lesson: Democracy depends on us being willing to hold our fellow humans to account as persistently, cleverly, tenaciously, and humanely as we can. Democracy is a struggle that never ends, because the alternative is what every opportunist desires: tyranny. 8.

One of the things about democratic governments that most people do not understand is that they are based on the simple idea that given the opportunity, many humans will literally say and do anything for power over others. What they want is clear a pathway to power (or money, status, fame, etc). 1.

This is an amazing thread on what may or may not be the UK constitution (including a pseudonymous letter to The Times in 1950). From the country that gave us the word “bonkers”

I used to be very much a written constitution guy - I liked the clear concepts and rules, the codification aspects. But at best rules are speedbumps. What matters are people and culture. And there is a huge danger people invest their faith, time and effort in the rules, not the people