American followers! Feel like you ought to have views on the UK's just-announced election (4th July!) but too traumatised by your own electoral nightmares to spend much time on ours? This thread is for you! 🇺🇸🇬🇧☠️🧵 As you’ve probably heard, Sunak’s Tory party are miles behind in the polls. This because they’ve been running the UK for fourteen years and the country has been in the toilet (often literally) for most of that period: zero growth, austerity, Brexit, sewage everywhere, omni-gloom

And finally Giuliani gets his mugshot to go alongside his old friend Bernie Kerik: striking to think that the two most powerful people in New York City government after 9/11 ended up in police custody

For all the drama of Giuliani's booking today, he still can't beat Bernie Kerik's incredible achievement of pleading guilty in court while having a major correctional facility named after him nytimes.com/2006/07/03/nyr…

A thread on the Telegraph's epic war on working-from-home: just a *selection* of the anti-WFH articles in "Britain's Best Quality Newspaper" since January of this year

Let's start with dogs, working from home is sending dog ownership to unsustainable levels WFH makes you less ambitious & productive

Just caught the first episode of the BBC's new series on trade unions & found it surprisingly moving

I can't remember *ever* seeing a TV show which explains simply & honestly why working people join unions - this kind of show just never gets made bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod… One thing the show captures brilliantly is the simple fact that workers *hate* going on strike; the scenes with the nurses, who walked out for the first time ever this winter, are absolutely devastating

If you want to know how conservatives (mostly old white men and their friends in the media) try to disrupt or deter research into legacies of slavery at British universities, ALL the receipts are here ⬇️ theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/… The behaviour of retired fellows @CaiusCollege is shocking. But this is also a story of a right-wing media backlash which smeared responsible & honest research as 'woke history'

If only vice-chancellors of UK universities had been bolder about this a year ago...

If only they could be more candid now in admitting that they have balanced the books by screwing their own staff
theguardian.com/education/2023… The government response to the SOS from vice chancellors is predictably mendacious. How can universities be "independent" when government fixes tuition fees, loan repayment terms & basic regulation?

More gaslighting from Westminster, a common thread of the past twenty years

For those too young to have lived through what happened twenty years ago, a thread of self-styled left/liberal types endorsing the invasion of Iraq Michael Ignatieff's infamous NYT magazine cover story from January 2003 (Ignatieff was founding director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights) nytimes.com/2003/01/05/mag…

Here's a clip of Joe Ellis (in conversation with Gordon Wood!) telling an audience in 2018 that academic historians ignore the Founding & only teach "anti-American history"; this shabby misrepresentation of the profession was doing the rounds long before 1619 TBF to Gordon Wood, elsewhere in this conversation he gently tries to reel in Ellis by saying that those stories of the "inarticulates" (!!!) do matter, while agreeing that the rest of the profession has essentially ditched the Founding. Full video: c-span.org/video/?443323-…

Have to confess I was shocked to read in the Telegraph that applicants from "privileged families" were "more than twice as likely to be rejected by top universities" than poorer kids. But of course it's another 'error' from the Telegraph's peerless education editor... The piece is based on a study by @markcorver and harvests some quotes from him; oddly, none reinforces the inflammatory claim about privileged kids being rejected at double the rate of poor kids. Instead we get the usual 'Oxford admissions source' to supply the killer line

🚨PERMANENT-HISTORY-JOB ALERT🚨
Cambridge is looking to hire a lecturer/assistant professor in BLACK BRITISH HISTORY (I know!!) to begin in October 2021. I am so excited about this I'm going to need a short thread to tell you about it 🧵 jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/28549/ First off: this is a huge post for Cambridge. (Even the ad made the student newspaper.) No pressure, but the successful candidate will help to shape our new curriculum (due in 2022) and our efforts to reimagine the history of Britain in the world thetab.com/uk/cambridge/2…

Hi @kemibadenoch, I saw that your government has followed the courageous lead of President Trump and banned critical race theory. I know you must be busy but could you let me know which of CRT's insights is now illegal? Or is it all of them? Thanks! This 2011 summary (by David Gillborn and @NicolaRollock) is hosted by the British Educational Research Association by the way, not a noted radical/Marxist organisation. Maybe you should get @beranews to take it down given your new crusade?

Four hundred years ago today the Mayflower left England for America, carrying the “Pilgrims” who founded Plymouth Plantation. A century ago this anniversary was a huge deal; now it’s…complicated (thread) The idea of Plymouth (and New England) as the origin of everything great about the United States has a long history: in the post-Revolutionary era, orators and historians (esp in New England) liked to present the Pilgrims as the pioneers of American independence

Have been trying to stay out of the Sean Wilentz/Tom Cotton debate about the supposedly antislavery potential of the Constitution, but a ton of people have emailed me this week so (deep breath) here are some thoughts on Wilentz's piece in @NYRDaily. nybooks.com/daily/2020/08/… Wilentz is queasy after Tom Cotton claimed him as an ally in the fight against the #1619Project and “radical historical revisionism” which seeks to argue that America was “founded on racism.” realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/07/…

It's dumb to be surprised by anything these days, but the fact that the Washington Post thinks whiteness is a "distinct cultural identity in the United States" means that one of the most important newspapers in America has embraced the logic of Richard Spencer & other neo-Nazis. Just to be clear - even the Washington Post journo who tweeted out the change to the style guide then conflated "distinct cultural identity" with "an ethnic group," which doesn't fill me with confidence that they've thought this through.

Not going to link to it but the Daily Mail’s second attack in a month on one of the BBC’s most prominent young Black journalists ought to be a wake-up call for those within and beyond the BBC who don’t realise the peril we’re in right now. (Thread) The story comes from Guido Fawkes, a far-right website which has debased our media even further and which regularly offers dog-whistles (and worse) to its readers - check the comments on pretty much any story and marvel at the fact that those are the _moderated_ replies.

I read Michael Gove’s big FDR speech so you don’t have to. TL;DR - I think FDR would sue. (Thread) The speech has Gove’s customary grandiloquence and rhetorical excess. The framing device is that the crisis we face is of 1930s proportions, and this means government needs to get radical.

A thread on the outrage (and worse) directed against my colleague Priya Gopal yesterday. First, the context: during a football match on Monday in which the players agreed to take the knee, local ‘fans’ hired a plane to fly a banner over the ground saying “WHITE LIVES MATTER”.
bbc.co.uk/sport/football…

Wow, this story about Cambridge moving lectures online for next year really blew up, didn’t it? A thread on what it means and what it doesn’t.⬇️ bbc.co.uk/news/education… Disclaimer 1: I teach at Cambridge but am nowhere near the University’s elite squad of contingency planners (yes, it is actually called Gold Team) so these views are personal and lightly informed.

I know it's Christmas but I can't muster good cheer at the assault on #1619Project by Sean Wilentz et al. (FWIW I took Wilentz/McPherson's seminar in 19th century U.S. history when I was in grad school and they've been singing the same tune for decades.) nytimes.com/2019/12/20/mag… Given their own platform - writing books for huge publishers & articles at the drop of a hat in major magazines/newspapers - what I find galling is their complaint about a "closed process". To think that the Times wouldn't pick _them_ to curate its historical enquiry!

Good morning, America! We had an election here in the UK yesterday. It was a huge win for Boris Johnson and the Tories. Here’s my best guess of what happens next. (Thread) (UK Twitter today is consumed by the causes of Labour’s defeat; it’s a dumpster fire of despond and recrimination, with centrists attacking leftists and vice versa. Let’s focus instead on the likely effects of Johnson’s victory.)

Parliament has been prorogued, the benches are empty, and Boris Johnson finally has a chance to rule without scrutiny from MPs. The perfect time for a thread about constitutional crisis. The term is everywhere these days - Reuters have even done a helpful guide reaching back to Magna Carta. For once I think the circumstances probably justify the hyperbole. What’s the problem and how did we get here? uk.reuters.com/article/uk-bri…