I enormously enjoyed this conversation with David Runciman about the history of compulsory voting, how it came to be adopted in countries like Belgium and Australia, and what it could for British politics today.

Golf courses take up more land than solar farms.

NEW ISSUE: Renewal Vol. 33 No. 2 Published amidst far-right mobilisation and a Reform surge, the new issue of Renewal (guest co-edited by @sachahilhorst.bsky.social) features activists, journalists, and academics analysing the radical right threat and debating how social democrats can respond

It was a very great pleasure to appear on one of my favourite podcasts, and to talk with David Runciman about the Past, Present, and Future (!) of electoral reform & proportional representation

SNB: SWF on.ft.com/4noL9xP

Welcome to Rip-Off Britain. A country remade by privatisation. Our latest project — Who Owns Britain? — explores how a radical experiment transformed our society and shapes your life. 🧵

This is a government that, for lack of belief in anything else, has basically decided to adopt self-hatred as its ideology

Loath though he is to alienate floating racists, perhaps Starmer could rouse himself to condemn a violent fascist rally teeming with people who want him overthrown and/or killed

Labour has been quietly going quite hard on "community empowerment" – possibly because it's one of the few halfway coherent theories knocking around the party about how to tackle anti-politics. I've spoken to a lot of people about it for @newstatesman.com: www.newstatesman.com/comment/2025...

The Guardian has today printed the names, and where possible, images, of all the media workers killed in Gaza, as part of an international day of action involving more than 150 media organisations. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

I’m very excited to share that my paper “Cleavage theory meets civil society: A framework and research agenda” with @eborbath.bsky.social & Swen Hutter has now been published online in ‪@wepsocial.bsky.social‬ (w/ open access funding thanks to @wzb.bsky.social‬!) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Very few social-democrat-vs-democratic-socialism vignettes can rival Sweden's future finance minister getting photographed in parliament scribbling ‘wage-earner funds are a fucking piece of shit.’ From @neilwarner.bsky.social's excellent recent article: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Thanks for flagging this Neil! Here is the working link: www.exploring-economics.org/en/discover/...

Organizing this workshop with @solveigdegen.bsky.social and @cominsitu.bsky.social, in case you'd like to join via zoom: hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/6969547647... Meeting ID: 696 9547 6478 Passcode: 800441 registration here: criticaltheoryinberlin.de/event/democr...

"Never before has the FRC had to return so many times to the same crisis; a stark reflection of how suffering has not only persisted but intensified and spread until famine has begun to emerge...As this famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed"

FT podcast on Peter Thiel contains some seriously mad stuff from Gillian Tett, who seems to really appreciate how Thiel's "Socratic, intellectual questioning approach" leads him to explore interesting new ideas about how dictatorships are good shows.acast.com/ft-tech-toni...

In 1926, Sheffield became the first major British city to come under Labour control. Published six years later, 'this little volume shows what was actually accomplished by a Labour Council with socialist ideals'. www.principle5.coop/wp-content/u...

"Carbon financiers continue to worry about a future in which Big Green States decide that substantive penalties on dirty finance would rapidly scale up climate finance by redirecting capital flows." @danielagabor.bsky.social

LIFT THE BAN - SEPTEMBER 6TH We can now announce that the next mass action to Lift The Ban on Palestine Action will take place on September 6th at 1pm, in Parliament Square. We are looking for 1,000 commitments before confirming the action. Register at: www.wedonotcomply.org

Kites for Palestine on the north end of the Isle of Iona

From Oban in west Scotland: "Stop the genocide now"

The Whitaker report 40 years ago "saw Ireland’s propensity to send people to prison as excessive, but the rate of incarceration today is more than twice what it was"

1/ The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation scheme forces starving Palestinians to scramble for scraps of food, while creating the illusion that sufficient aid is reaching Gaza. Aid cannot be used as a tool to control, punish, or manipulate an entire population.

The only photo I could find on blue sky with the interior of Iona Abbey with candles.

now published: The Socialization Debate Revolutionary Confusion after the German Revolution of 1918 Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 46, Issue 1, 2025, Pages 93-122 doi.org/10.5840/gfpj...

Awdah Hathaleen, a young Palestinian activist, was murdered by Israeli settlers yesterday in his village in the West Bank. This is an article that he wrote 8 years ago

yeap, the mighty trade block can only bully Global South countries into unfavourable trade deals.

The funny thing about this take is that if they'd let them, Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott all would have remained in the Labour Party, arguing for everyone else to stay in the party, until the day they died.

My new op-ed essay in the @financialtimes.com. on.ft.com/4kKqiTb The growing Brics divide between carbon and electro-states

Gaza is now officially in IPC Phase 5, the final stage of hunger. Designated as 'catastrophe'. A further 67 of the starving were killed by IDF soldiers yesterday trying to access food. Witnesses say the victims had their hands held in the air. One day, everyone will have always been against this.

Amnesty International: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a ‘cruel and unlawful betrayal’ www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

It's a global far-right antidemocratic coalition

My new Constitution Society report on compulsory voting has now been published. I argue that low turnout has left the UK with an unrepresentative electorate. This is creating warped incentives for politicians, and contributing to low growth, high inequality, and rising democratic discontent.

Israel killed 74 people in Gaza today alone, and Nasser Hospital is running out of fuel. The WHO says that Israel has attacked medical facilities over 600 times in nearly 2 years. That's roughly an attack every two days for nearly 2 years. www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblo...

Our book is out! A critical interrogation of interdisciplinarity as a transformative practice to confront power in a time of crisis. My chapter: "The climate crisis and interdisciplinary pedagogy". Buy it, request it for your library, and message me for my chapter! www.routledge.com/Interdiscipl...

It makes sense to expect a new age of inducements for institutional capital pools to hold sovereign debt (aka financial repression), as @martinsandbu.ft.com argued last week. Alas, it appears state managers are too macrofinancially incompetent to pull that off and instead are self-sabotaging bigly.

What happens when you antagonise much of the middle of the party into getting organised? What then, left-libs? www.newstatesman.com/politics/lab...

Elon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030. Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.

I wrote about my often fairly miserable time on the doorstep last summer hearing just how much the public hates politicians, and how Labour hasn't – and maybe can't – deal with the anti-politics that feeds Reform: labourlist.org/2025/07/labo...

Since the great financial crisis, much has been written in CPE on the fate of South European economies. Have they really morphed into export-led growth models? With what outcomes? Are their trajectories convergent? In this new DP, we use granular data to put claims from the literature to the test 🧵

NEW: Labour's planned disability benefit cuts could affect the majority of current working-age claimants with ischaemic heart disease, inflammatory arthritis, hip and knee disorders and Crohn’s disease, according to analysis of new DWP data By me, for the Big Issue: www.bigissue.com/news/social-...

In the words of Nelson Mandela: it always seems impossible until it’s done. My friends, it is done. And you are the ones who did it. I am honored to be your Democratic nominee for the Mayor of New York City.

108 Labour backbenchers - that is 27% of the PLP of 403, and about 48% of the backbench (which is around 227 Labour MPs, with about 176 having a frontbench role of some kind).

I'd love to think Brian Wilson was trolling the interviewer here but somehow I'm not sure he was.

"25 Palestinians were killed that morning waiting for aid trucks. Hamza brought Hatem’s body back to Gaza City & buried him beside their mother, who was killed by an Israeli sniper in Aug 2024. Their brother, Khalid, 21, died in a Jan airstrike while evacuating wounded civilians on his horse cart."

Orwell hacked UvdL and posted a poem

Zohran Mamdani is standing up to the oligarchy and fighting to make one of America’s most expensive cities affordable for the working class. If you’re a New York City voter, I urge you to rank him #1 on your ballot by next Tuesday. @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social