Sacha Hilhorst

Hugely recommend this to my fellow early-career sociologists - I went last year and it was amazing.

I've been slow to share this because in all honesty I was a little bit hungover on Saturday, but I wrote the New Statesman's weekend essay this week, on why England's ex-mining areas have become especially disenchanted with politics:

www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza Israel controls the flow of food into Gaza. It has calculated how many calories Palestinians need to stay alive. Its data shows only a fraction has been allowed in

This is a very clear historical and current summary, and utterly damning. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Five survivors of Rotherham grooming gangs say they were also raped by police officers Three former South Yorkshire police officers arrested in investigation into claims by the women, as young as 12 at the time

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

...and obviously the marginalia are a delight and deserved to be preserved for posterity! Lots of her scathing notes from the 1980s about Gramsci being moralising and useless haha

For any bookbinding fans interested in the technical specs, Nat says he did a new perfect bind on the spine, then made a photopolymer plate to match the front and letterpressed it onto the new book cloth spine and did a foil imprint.

One of my most prized possessions is my mum's old copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, with her marginalia. Last year it sadly fell apart.

Turns out my partner has been secretly working to restore it, as a birthday present. Here it is, all rebound, with my mum's and my initials added on the spine.

Places to come together: Rebuilding local solidarities against the far right | IPPR In late July 2024, the seaside town of Southport in Merseyside burst into the national consciousness when it suffered two different, violent events in succ

Great new @ippr.org report from @sachahilhorst.bsky.social, making very clear the link between the decline of community spaces and the rise of the radical right. Sacha reimagines the 20th century miners' welfare fund as a model for reviving social infrastructure:
www.ippr.org/articles/pla...

who could possibly have foreseen

BS: How was that? How long were you in jail? MM: One night. They let you make one phone call, and I called the Ugandan Ambassador in Washington, DC, talked to him, and he said, “What are you doing interfering in the affairs of a foreign country?” I said, “What? We just got our independence! This is the same struggle. Have you forgotten?” Anyway, he got me out. Two or three weeks later, I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, “FBI.” I thought, “Wow, just like on television.” They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone – because this turned out to be big – it is after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma. They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?” I said, “I haven’t met him.” Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.” “Wow, what happened?” “No, no, he died long ago.” I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?” “No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.” I said, “Sounds amazing.” I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.

rare W for COINTELPRO from a legendary conversation between Bhakti Shringarpure and Mahmood Mamdani (h/t Silke-Marie Weineck)

“The future rulers of the void will conquer it with front facing camera.”

I appreciate that Yuan. It's been such a bleak time for my trans friends and my football team is no longer allowed to play in our amateur Sunday league because we refuse to cast out our teammates. The interim guidance cannot stand.

Thank you Rebecca, that's so kind. I'm really glad it resonated! And yes, hopefully a book before too long - the interview materials are so rich, and I want to do justice to them.

And by the way, if your mum has any thoughts on the article I'd love to hear!

Huge congrats! Must be such a relief to have not just the viva but also the fellowship - I hope you’re celebrating properly

Contra Adam Curtis, it is not true and never has been true that British xenophobia and racism are confined to "the old industrial towns".

Can confirm it’s been brilliant and MC promises working paper will be up on SSRN soon

Ah yes, creating a class of asset-rich ex-industrial workers otherwise abandoned by the state - famously productive of healthy, democratic subjectivities

I spent so much time in Morrisons cafés during fieldwork, especially the Mansfield Woodhouse one, which is among the 52 that has just shut. No wonder people feel everything is constantly getting worse.

I really hope independent local cafés can fill some of the gap, but there's not much left.

Predictably, Morrisons has been doing job cuts, asset sales and leasebacks since the private equity takeover, despite its new American owners' promises to the contrary when they bought the chain in 2021.

The NS piece cites the CEO, who blames the minimum wage hike. But that's just not credible when Morrisons is posting large and rising profits. It's greed from its private equity owners, who had long been eyeing the chain's assets, from its freeholds to its plants and abattoirs.

Britain’s aisles of strangers As the last Morrisons café closes its doors, the nation’s community spirit is further eroded.

Morrisons has closed 52 cafés since March - such a blow to many communities.

But imo it's a mistake to think of this as mostly a story about loss of community spirit, as this New Statesman piece does, when it's really about the harm caused by private equity.

www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

The CEO blames the minimum wage hike, which is not believable when Morrisons is posting large and rising profits. It's greed from its private equity owners, who had long been eyeing the chain's assets, from its freeholds to its processing plants and abattoirs.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

I don’t know if they’re even getting it from focus groups. I’ve been doing interviews and some focus groups in the midlands, including with Reform voters and the Reform-curious, and those certainly wouldn’t fuel the idea that these are ‘our’ voters who will imminently return with improved messaging…

Just out! Our peer-reviewed critique of the Cass Review has been published by BMC Medical Research Methodology. Please read and share. We show that the Cass Review is fatally flawed and should not be the basis for policy or practice in transgender healthcare.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

UK woman loses jail term appeal after killing man as he sexually assaulted her Martyna Ogonowska was sentenced in 2018 to 17 years in prison for stabbing Filip Jaskiewicz to death in a car park

This is like reading one of those horrific VAW miscarriages of justice from 30 years ago www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

How researchers at Bocconi guessed the Pope using network analysis ⬇️

www.unibocconi.it/en/news/netw...

Incredible stat. Labour have been so so fortunate compared to basically every other European soc dem party to have young people and graduates on side and they’re squandering it.

every gender transition is a statement in favor of human possibility and freedom and i’m tired of hearing it talked about like it’s some kind of disease

It is based on my recent @bjsociology.bsky.social paper, if anyone wanted to get into the weeds of it: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

When I was living in Mansfield, 'corruption' was one of the main ways of understanding politics. Not ideology, not policy - because 'it's all lies anyway'. It is no coincidence that this frame thrives especially in ex-mining communities. Here I trace the connection between the two.