#MBS2026 is looking incredible. Hard to convey how exciting this lineup is for the interdisciplinary realm of British Studies. You can find the full programme and registration details via this link
www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/moder...
I know I harp on this a lot, but it is the continuation of "Parliament just isn't a real workplace," that sees them all taking bungs from gambling companies and tobacco lobbyists and then wondering why people are cross.
You just can't get away with this stuff in the private sector.
No10’s account is incredible.
I held Developed Vetting for nearly ten years and spent three years at the heart of the Cabinet Office. I have never heard of a Developed Vetting denial being overruled. Here’s why…🧵
www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
We're in a big auditorium at UCL on Weds for Champion Black Boxers and Businessmen in 1800s London - talk, film, panel, about Bill Richmond, Tom Molineaux, Bridgerton, A Thousand Blows!
Join Tony Warner, Roberto Nigro, Luke G. Williams, S. I. Martin & me:
FREE: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/champion-b...
I know this has circulated with alacrity recently, so you may have already seen it, but if you haven't... WOW BOY HOWDY it's the most useful thing.
Thank you cardcatalogforlife.substack.com -- this is a very very very helpful public service:
cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...
Between 15 April and 18 April we at Oxford Brookes will be holding our regular Think Human festival... There are events on motherhood, the sounds of football, slavery, Putin's opponents, experiencing HIV and Oxford's philosophers, among many others. Come along!
www.eventbrite.com/cc/think-hum...
A tweet from the Daily Mail with a headline saying "Four biblical signs the world has entered the end of days as US bombs Iran
This perfectly illustrates my point that the British tabloids are aiming at a US audience. There like 5 people in the UK who think about this. But it is huge among US evangelicals.
British politicians need to ignore UK tabloids, as UK tabloids are talking to an audience in the US for clicks.
This IPSO adjudication against the Telegraph is quite something
Confirms their story titled: ‘We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays’ was completely fabricated, with the family involved non-existent and stock pictures used
www.ipso.co.uk/rulings/0210...
It feels like the Labour party is entirely staffed by university graduates from middle class backgrounds who believe ideologically that Labour should be the party of the working classes whilst simultaneously being extremely prejudiced about and disconnected from the actual real life working classes.
'The skills white paper...encourages greater specialisation across the higher education sector, with the aim of aligning provision more closely to economic needs and political priorities. The government also said reforms to research funding would encourage specialisation.' 2/3
Neither the PM nor his aides clocked that it would be seen as an echo of Enoch Powell. 'Keir doesn't read,' a minister notes. 'He has no hinterland.' MPs saw this as McSweeney pandering to Reform voters, rather than going after those who were switching to the Greens in growing numbers. 'It was not about chasing Reform,' a McSweeney ally insists. 'It was about respecting where most of Middle Britain is.' Starmer was inundated with criticism from MPs 'and his lefty lawyer mates'. Approach-ing the anniversary of his election, he agreed to a chat with Tom Baldwin, his biographer, and said 'island of strangers' made him uncomfortable. Baldwin rushed an interview into the Observer, cutting across a Sunday Times profile which had been in the works for weeks. 'He thought he was just having a drink with an old mate,' says a No. 10 source. 'He didn't tell anybody in the operation that he didn't like the "island of strangers" speech before he told Tom Baldwin. He shat himself at the first whiff of cordite.' The effect on his staff was profound. 'Keir basically threw everyone under the bus,' one says, 'That really turned things in terms of the internal dynamics. Even people who didn't like the speech were stunned that he would try to wash his hands of it and hang people out to dry. It also undermined those people with civil servants, who see that the boss won't back them up."
Some extracts from the Tim Shipman long read "Keir and Loathing" (at least the PM is a gift to headline writers) This on the "island of strangers" speech
🧵In today’s Times @joshglancy.bsky.social has a brilliant write up of our focus groups he sat in on. Definitely read it in full! But I want to focus on two voters: Kylie & Eve I think have outsized importance in explaining today’s politics
www.thetimes.com/article/b75e...
Same for me last night
📣You have just under a month to send in your proposal for our 2026 Social History Society Conference - where we will be celebrating out 50th anniversary!
👉Find out more here: socialhistory.org.uk/conference/s...
Did medieval people buy each other Christmas gifts? New Year's Day was the main gifting day, but little is known about everyday people's present giving. Our project on London's customs records has uncovered a wealth of affordable items imported around this time: gloves and hats to toys and rattles🧵
And people clearly still remember and love Annabel Giles. But I imagine you never thought she'd have to claim benefits. We all need a safety net underclass.substack.com/p/annabels-s...
Pls read, RT and subscribe.
'Leary’s study, to be published in the Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management, is the first to examine the relationship between nurse staffing levels and death rates over time.'
Meanwhile, how many universities are closing or shrinking their nursing programmes in the funding crisis?
Finally, if you can get through the paywall this piece from earlier in the week illuminates how the experience above is just a tiny part of an industrial-scale, global, and sector-wide catastrophe of AI and citations to nonexistent papers in academic publishing bsky.app/profile/mile...
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
The Spring programme for the London Group of Historical Geographers is now live. We start again on 13 January with Thermal Horizons: Energy and Infrastructures of British Global Power, c. 1830-1900. In person at the IHR, London and on Zoom. Free and open to the public. All welcome, please register.
Today we published a report on public understanding & attitudes to #irregularmigration in the UK.
this is my a one-line summary:
strong opinions, wrong facts.
But there is so much more to it. Ultimately the picture is much more nuanced and complex...
i-claim.eu/project/publ...
2024-25 community life survey, which has a large sample of 175k, distributed at 500+ in each local authority area
The findings are stable year on year & reflect the themes of the State of Us
Generally high local belonging
Mixed trust
Varied civic participation
www.gov.uk/government/s...
'There in the shadows [of the White Paper] lies the call for HE institutions to specialise, with the lurking threat that many will lose their research funding in some, but perhaps many, areas, in order to better fund those with more intensive research.'
An early Christmas present for all you Court of Requests fans. *All* the calendared Elizabethan proceedings [TNA REQ 2/26-294], over 20,000 items in total, are now searchable on The National Archives' online catalogue. Ho ho ho 🎄 discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/C...
What?!
If you are a historian with policy-facing interests who has recently submitted their PhD (or will do so imminently), this fantastic new London-based postdoc fellowship in Applied History could be for you. www.history.ac.uk/fellowships/...
A blast from my past - the Medieval Soldier database takes nearly 300,000 military service records from 1369-1453 and makes them available as a searchable database.
An invaluable resource for understanding medieval warfare, society and the English medieval state. Learn more in the link. 🗃️
One thing that strikes me is that we often didn't "do the reading" in the past, because there wasn't any expected. As far as I remember, most sessions, at least for the first two years, were lectures pretty passively absorbed. We expect much more active student engagement now
