It's going to be such a relief to have straight-talking Andy Burnham, who knows what he thinks and isn't afraid to say it, running Number 10.

This a million times. It's obvious that rejoin is a complex multilevel process. And ultimately the politics might become too difficult. The UK is not in a rejoin moment but it will never get there without establishing it as a goal/mission. Streeting/Burnham etc are not dumb.

Fwiw I don't think people are reading this particularly carefully, and a lot of it just has to do with different disciplines. The complaint is clearly "should fourth or fifth authors on papers be banned for the actions of first authors?" In many academic domains that would be untenable.

Amsterdam is home to the first underwater bike parking in the world. It's open 24/7, can house 7,000 bikes and 700 rental bikes and has a shop for maintenance and repair. Construction costs were around 60 million euros. That's cheap compared to the annual savings on healthcare costs from cycling!

Partly what I meant here bsky.app/profile/twll...

If we're going to have quizzes which are clearly written for only one part of the world, can we have some from places that aren't the US? Imagining an NI Political Compass, 80% of the questions for which would be trying to work out if you're one of Themmuns.

Finally - and coolest of all - you can now plot demographics against voter behaviour, controlling for other demographics. So this is a partial regression plot of Reform against Age over 65, controlling for non-white population and population with degrees. And oh... no real robust relationship n/n

Yes but even considered at a general European level I think the interest here is preventing a monopoly supply of certain things - it doesn’t have to be manufactured in Europe. Mercosur could be a good way of ensuring rare earth refining for example.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Here’s something those in favour of re-industrialisation probably don’t know or care to think about: even China is DE-industrialising. Doing the opposite probably means fighting the natural tendency of progress.

Re industrialisation is possible in output terms, but what it means is building multiple square miles of mostly automated manufacturing that employs ~100 people. Not sure the uk planning system would allow this!

Isn't the issue that modern manufacturing doesn't create anywhere near the same number of jobs as the old model? So it's not that there's any issue encouraging more manufacturing, just that it won't "save" deinustralised areas?

One can agree or disagree with the policies of idk Thatcher or Wilson, but they didn't actually give any time to the National Front? Why would they

It’s also why any attempts to reduce fees for SHAPE subjects are also a threat to STEM subjects. An attack on one is an attack on all.

This is such a blatant abuse of economics/data I will assign it in my Data Analysis course next term..

The answer is no. There is no way that smartphones are responsible for a 40% decline in worldwide fertility rate. This is what the graph looks like from 1970 to the present (from @ourworldindata.org).

Bring back Jack Ryan, nerdy wimp, you cowards youtu.be/-4ZVFspRn3M?...

Me, after the 1832 Reform Act:

Bulgaria's most important geopolitical contribution.

Imagine how relieved the President of the EBU and the director general of the BBC are right now.

Correction: Bangaranga is Graham Norton for "thank fuck"

Can we afford Billy Joel? No Can we afford a John Legend impersonator? Just about

American Bluesky: TRUMP LIED (AGAIN) European Bluesky: These hosts are terrible (again)

ABC News has now taken all FiveThirtyEight articles completely offline. They now redirect to abcnews dot com.politics. A needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.

Ok, as we are waiting for crunch time, I’m sure you absolutely want to see this rocket political science plot: The trend is clear, even if noisy: countries with higher liberal democracy scores also tend to perform better at #Eurovision #esc2026 (data: @vdeminstitute.bsky.social)

Amazing to think that 100 years ago we were all murdering each other and now we’re doing this instead

The Austrian hosts are really not challenging any stereotypes about teutonic humour 😬 #Eurovision

Australia's act seems to be Moon Knight inspired

Yes, it is racist to lay the responsibility of Israel's actions at the feet of Jews, just like it's racist to blame your local Indian restaurant owner for the actions of Narendra Modi.

I’m not sure the annual Racism Day march should continue in light of the whole of society push to eliminate antisemitism but that’s just me.

London Marathon record for a sitting MP is Matthew Parris's *2:32:57* in 1985

A reminder of why allowing internet archiving is so important (at a time when too many news orgs are blocking places like @archive.org ).

Something I find incredibly irritating is how people criticise a supposedly new British habit of flippantly ditching prime ministers. Literally everyone here agrees it was great to ditch Johnson, absolutely vital that Truss should go, and cheered the defeat of Sunak. All show the system working!

Would like to hear more "so-called Unite the Kingdom", like "so-called Islamic State" a decade or so back

I know the local elections were seven hundred years ago in Labour-time but I thought I'd share a little app I made that lets you look at the English ward results on a map and compared to various Census demographics. Warning the map takes a while to load. 1/n benwansell.github.io/local-electi...

Surprised that Stalin ended up outsourcing this one

At last.

I see Simon Heffer, in Michael Gove's Spectator, is once again repeating his lie that Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech wasn't about race.. I debated Heffer recently (at the Oxford Litfest) - here's what I said. archive.ph/bqKZF

What I don't get about these attempts to rehabilitate Powell is that Powell himself was often pretty frank about his racism. You could go through the archives and you can see interviews where he says only White people can be British, that he is a racist because racism is natural, etc

“He’s very conflict-averse. Andy wants to be loved and avoids making difficult decisions.” I don’t want to be a downer but isn’t this what Jess Philips, Wes Streeting and everyone else have been complaining about with Keir Starmer?

Burnham has had nine years here. Has he learned loads about policy/politics on the ground, what resonates, why people are angry, how to build on his existing instinct to campaign for the underdog? Yes. Does your fundamental character change? No. If you’re conflict averse you stay conflict averse

👇👇

One thing I would like to see from industry bodies in this country is a preventative outright ban on synthetic panels for public political and social attitude polling. It should be blacklisting offence. Even if the tech was significantly better than it is or ever could be, it has no justification.

I think this maybe the most niché bit of trivia I’ve ever heard.

15/10 post!

For my part I think that the open fascists currently sending my neighbors to concentration camps are worse than Pete Buttigieg but to be fair to McKay I’m a millennial and so was exposed to substantially less environmental lead during brain development

The standards committee must decide if this gift could be related to political/public role. A defence could that a £5m gift was "purely private" + "wasn't political in any sense at all" (May 5th) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... To say "reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years" disrupts that