‘Exam-obsessed’ schools leave pupils unready for work, Alan Milburn says Former minister leading review into young people and work cites survey showing most teachers decry lack of ‘soft skills’

Wait till he finds out which government introduced school targets for GCSEs and primary tests 🙄
www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Started messing with LLM as a search tool. Could it identify EBRD employees and their university education? looking for socialisation patterns relations, etc. not wholly convinced with the accuracy of the list 🤔

And season 1 of The Pitt had been so good 🙄

Probably time to get some solar panels up on the roof?

Sunset clauses & strict governance reforms support the emergence of the shock‑absorber state developed across a series of Transition Reports to cushion crises, stabilise societies, and clear the path for private capital without challenging the broader logics of ... neoliberal common sense.

The state steps back in. The EBRD reverses its position and accepts that states must ensure resilience, manage crises, de‑risk private investment, support industrial policy and drive the green transition, but the EBRD insists this should be temporary, targeted, and market‑friendly.

What happens when the long standing intellectual rationale & policy advice of one of the key European development finance institutions is pressured to recalibrate that message when the financial crash, COVID, energy price shocks, & the war in Ukraine expose the limits of “self‑correcting” markets?

The image shows the front page of an article in New Political Economy called The collective organic intellectual strikes back.

This is out in the wild a little sooner than I'd anticipated! If you don't have institutional access - 50 free eprints here www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZFHUM... or just email me.

The Long Good Friday - Abattoir scene (1980) YouTube video by Ian Phillips: Classic TV-Interviews, Music & Films

I hope you all celebrated Good Friday in the traditional manner youtu.be/AGm2dvRK7Uw?...

Hi Umit - is this condensed from an article you've written or just the substack?

Academic year 2025-26 has been rather stressful so it was nice to be reminded why I started all this in the first place: research. Thanks to two great referees (peer review not broken) & anyone who sat through me trying to make sense of babayagas looming over cityscapes & tanks in fields.

For Sale: Farnley Hey II, Farnley Tyas, West Yorkshire One of Britain’s most celebrated modern houses, Farnley Hey in West Yorkshire was designed by the architect Peter Womersley in 1954 as a wedding present to his brother.

Finally found a house that matches our Robin Day chairs 😆
themodernhouse.com/sales-list/f...

School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books - Index on Censorship A school librarian faced a disciplinary hearing and scores of books were removed from her school library after she stocked Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women

Every time I think things can't get worse ... the 51st state 🙄

www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/scho...

Former Conservative MP Crispin Blunt charged with four drugs offences Ex-MP for Reigate, 65, accused of one count of possessing a class A drug and three of possessing a class B drug

nominative determinism www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Who's been reading Alami and Dixon, then?

1974: Manchester - the Corporation and the People | Tuesday Documentary | BBC Archive YouTube video by BBC Archive

Extraordinary piece of social history from the BBC archive about Manchester. Plus ça change ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0SO...

The Redskins - Neither Washington nor Moscow YouTube video by wandabroi

Traumatised that this is 40 years old today.

youtu.be/gFdxkb-MbJQ?...

Pretty much the case of every cultural reference point I make 😆

‘Why the hell am I doing this?’ The man navigating Manchester’s biggest job Students cheating via AI and international applications ‘tanking’ – Duncan Ivison is at the helm of a big ship in stormy waters

a pretty fair piece on the VC as well as the wider struggles all UK HE is facing from the @manchestermill.bsky.social

manchestermill.co.uk/why-the-hell...

The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete Jimmy Iovine just called the Death of Spotify. He might be right.

we can but hope joelgouveia.substack.com/p/the-death-...

One might even think it’s deliberate.

Manchester Political Economy Centre & Global Political Economy Research Cluster seminar 4th March 3:30-5pm: Simon 5.04 All welcome

Heloise Weber (University of Queensland) Anti-colonial struggles and the politics of organizing structural injustice: Critique of the ‘Right to Development’

The next Global Policy North Workshop will be hosted by the Centre for Global Law and Governance at the University of St Andrews 24-25 June 2026. Call for papers in the attached but TL;DR version ... if you're working on global governance/policy you'll find it interesting!

Student finance: student loans aren’t broken - they protect inherited advantage - HEPI This blog was kindly authored by Hannah Rolley, Head of Access at Trinity College Oxford. We are told, endlessly, that student finance is a problem of scale: the size of the loan, the length of repaym...

"But student finance isn’t broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect inherited advantage while shifting risk onto those with the least"

www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/02/24/s...

Labour are totally asleep at the wheel with regard to university funding, student loans, regional economies, and seem to have little sense of the electoral implications of that.

Bloody hell they were brilliant.

‘The time of monsters’: everyone is quoting Gramsci – but what did he actually say? Line handily sums up people’s bewilderment at state of world, but it isn’t quite what the Marxist thinker wrote

Down to c.500, and many of them belong to Nino, staring out of this morning's Guardian reproachfully www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

and I was having a difficult time getting a journal R&R to 10,000 from 11,479

The Universities’ Doom Spiral – Can Britain avert disaster? Spotify video

This will cheer all my academic colleagues up no end ... the excellent @gsoh31.bsky.social on the equally excellent @ohgodwhatnow.bsky.social podcast open.spotify.com/episode/3uWt...

is it being racist that helps you become a billionaire, or does being a billionaire help turn you racist?