Today @thinklabour.bsky.social publishes our report on Muslim voters, dispelling some misconceptions. Muslims - like most other Brits - prioritise the cost of living above any other issue including the conflict in Gaza. thinklabour.co.uk/thinking/gon...

Relatedly, why does no-one in Labour seem able to make the positive case for higher education?

🚨Elon Musk has boosted the public profile of Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe on X, pulling Britain’s political discourse towards extreme content and amplifying his influence ahead of a knife-edge election in Makerfield More @FT: as.ft.com/r/80f4639f-0...

To put a number on it, in the HE sector as a whole in 23/24, the total surplus generated from overseas fees was £3.2 bn, which was used to cover in part the £1.7bn loss from teaching home students and the £5bn loss from research. (£2bn came in from investment income from endowments & donations).

Looks like we've passed peak academia. www.ft.com/content/8097... via @data.ft.com

Fascinating thread (particularly for those who like both football and social science)

Very excited that @louiseluxton.bsky.social & I have been awarded a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant! We’ll be fielding surveys in Britain, Germany & Denmark to examine which parties voters think “own” different gender issues & comparing this to the issues parties actually emphasise in manifestos

🚨We're hiring🚨 We're recruiting for three exciting permanent roles within our Research and Policy team, at different levels of experience. Find our more and apply now ➡️ buff.ly/N4Xuj8b

🚨 Last day for paper proposals! 🚨

Me, in the Guardian today, on Reform voters and sympathisers in England's post-industrial towns www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Excellent stuff. Explains a few things including why Iris Murdoch missed out

I'm not sure what kind of economic model you get to where a wealth tax is existential for the future of economic growth but zero net immigration is just vibes and social cohesion. When I did economics they taught us that you needed inputs if you wanted outputs but I guess the literature has moved on

Strong agree - this is such a useful article!

May not keep this one up too long, but here is a temperature check of where we are at these days with formerly 'just a normal classical liberal' types

Fellas, is it a red flag if your parliamentary candidate has traced back their family name in the area over the last 200 years?

This letter from Wes Streeting reads awfully like the beginnings of an Andy Burnham deal... "a battle of ideas, not of personalities or petty factionalism. It needs to be broad, and it needs the best possible field of candidates. I support that approach and I hope that you will facilitate this."

(would also be interested in seeing this with % degree holders, although it's obv highly correlated with both age and occupation)

The local elections in one chart. Labour has been squeezed between the Greens in young wards and Reform in older working-class wards www.economist.com/britain/2026...

This looks to be true in the left bloc but less so in the right bloc (Reform around 50% in both security groups). Suggests that there is less competition/salience within the right on economic issues, likely to the detriment of the Conservatives.

⏰ CALL FOR PAPERS - EPSS PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP ON PLACE, POLITICS AND EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY ⏰ Submit by Weds 20 May! For all those interested in politics of geographic divides and keen to explore impact potential of their work. More info/submit here: shorturl.at/xS0iS @twanhuijsmans.bsky.social

Q: Does my thesis adviser pick the snake? A: No. Your adviser just tells the guy who picks the snakes how good your thesis was.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 New Blog 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 A short piece on how the new Senedd voting system worked! How many votes did it take to win a seat? Was it proportional? Who benefitted? Where did parties win support? And what would it take to win one more seat? If you're interested: blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/thinking-wal... 🧵👇

My post on tactical voting at the local and devolved elections 2026: blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandp... No evidence of effective anti-Reform tactical switching by the left, so 50% of Reform gains were in places were most votes were for parties of the left....

BREAKING - Parliamentary Standards Commissioner will launch an investigation into Farage's £5m donation.

Today’s Education Select Committee report on higher education is the best report on HE to come from Govt/Parliament in ages. It takes a rounded view of the whole system, moving away from the more atomistic or narrow accounts we’ve seen 🧵 committees.parliament.uk/committee/20...

Is partner partisanship associated with vote choice? @cerifowler.bsky.social finds that it was for the 2016 Brexit Referendum & subsequent elections in the UK & argues that this can help us understand gender gaps in vote choice. Read OPEN ACCESS: buff.ly/D8Fdnbw @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social #polsky

I spent way too long this weekend correlating 81 census variables with local election results, so you don't have to. Enjoy! datawrapper.dwcdn.net/QQQ3D/7/

Without minimising the dire results for Labour, it’s extraordinary how chipper the Tories are. They’ve lost 500 seats from a low watermark, lost historic major councils to Lib Dems and Reform, show no signs of recovery in the esp LD areas they need to win. But MPs seem to think it’s going well.

For anyone else up with the lark, I'm about to go on 5Live to discuss the local elections

Latest Rallings and Thrasher NEV for Sky News interesting. Modest Reform dip on last year, small Tory uptick, Labour down further, Greens up

Imagine seeing Labour suffer one of its worst ever election results and your immediate takeaway is "the man whose entire strategy delivered this must have been right"

I fear Labour people risk falling into an ecological fallacy visible from space when reacting to these results. Here is what is very clear in results so far: Labour are losing *seats* to Reform, but... Labour are losing *votes* to the Greens Greens split the vote, Ref comes thru middle

I’m pleased to see people realising this morning that a Lab>Reform seat change can happen because Lab>others and Con>Reform. The underlying vote flow evidence has been screaming this since autumn 2024 😎.

“Someone who cannot criticise the actions of the Israeli government without suggesting that British Jews should be punished for those actions is, at a basic level, incompetent.” Hear, hear @stephenkb.bsky.social as.ft.com/r/a0177a88-e...

This thread is the most uplifting thing I’ve seen today. My takeaway is that hard work is never wasted.

Not to be blunt but I don't see how closing all the departments whose courses are cheap to deliver is going to save universities any money?

This is welcome -- and it would be good if political parties in the UK could follow

Excoriating stuff - and brilliant

On 31 March 2025 the Office for Students employed 475 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff.

Judgment now available online. The OfS does not come out of it well at all. Final line: “The Final Decision was vitiated by bias because the OfS approached the decision with a closed mind and had therefore unlawfully predetermined the decision.” www.judiciary.uk/judgments/th...

Big change today with the ONS's new population forecast. Rather than expecting the UK population to keep growing until 2095, the current projections have it start to decline from 2055 onwards.

Right-wing parties do well in these projections because their votes are not correlated (i.e. they win different sorts of seat), similar to Labour and the Lib Dems in 2024. Problem for left parties that the Greens and Labour tend to do well in similar areas so they are competing over fewer seats

If this is the new Voigt-Kampff test then I've failed

Voters without ID have just one day left to apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate to use at the upcoming local elections in England. To vote at a polling station, voters must present an accepted form of photo ID. A Voter Authority Cert. is a free form of ID for those who lack any.

Good piece. Especially the point that three quarters of degrees are already “vocational”

The first two sentences of literally every abstract I've ever written

Takes a heart of stone not to laugh.

It's v interesting that Cummings, Liam Booth-Smith (Sunak's Chief of Staff) and now McSweeney are all working in or planning to work in AI. As well as Osborne and Sunak.

Excellent write up. Still shocking to me just how little understood the below cause and effect is understood by the UK's political class.