Alix Mortimer

Title and abstract of the accepted paper.

Over the moon 😍. My paper "Renewing Democracy:
How Exposure to Electoral Turnovers Reinforces Citizens’ Democratic Support" is accepted in World Politics. LINK: osf.io/preprints/os....

First paper fully conceived since my second child was born 4 years ago. For those who know, big milestone.

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The way my jaw dropped

SPECTATOR Nigel Jones The teenage Farage story misses the point All schoolboys were once obsessed with Hitler

In short, Hitler and Himmler lived permanently rent-free in all our heads. In one of my schools a boy was caned by his housemaster after a copy of Mein Kampf was found in his locker. The teacher wielding the cane had spent the war debriefing prisoners from Rommel's Afrika Korps, so was slightly parti pris, and the fact that the guilty culprit had found Hitler's autobiography in the school library did not save him from six of the best. So even if the teenage Farage made the sort of remarks attributed to him - and he has denied doing so - he would be entirely typical of his class and generation.

The British upper class, barely even bothering to deny the allegations any more

The answer might seem obvious. To much of the country it is obvious: Brexit is an unpopular disaster. But those whose memories stretch back to the beginning of the decade will recall that politicians who muttered even in the privacy of their hearts that trade barriers might harm the economy found themselves denounced in newspapers. Here was a Conservative leader saying it. Oh Daily Mail, who now are the enemies of the people? Oh Telegraph, where is thy “Mutineers” front page? As it happened, the Liberal Democrats had a vote down on Tuesday afternoon calling for a customs union with the EU. It was a bit of procedure, binding no one to anything, so it didn’t matter, but it was notable that the Tory benches were empty, just 21 of them there. No Mark Francois, no Iain Duncan Smith. Who would speak for Brexit?

Today's customs union vote is entirely symbolic, it's true. But what does it symbolise that no one is now arguing *for* Brexit?

thecritic.co.uk/regr...

“HE managers will close any programme or department rather than go to therapy” etc

On it’s stated objective no, on its actual objective of maintaining the administrator’s false self-image as a means of deadening their internal screaming psychological pain it works very well.

And I could improve them all!

The Rightmove Roundup Alix's 2025 To celebrate 25 years of helping the nation make their move, we looked into Britain's 2025 home-hunting habits. But first, let's look at your year in homes... You spent 7 hours with us

You looked at 263 homes Can't get enough of floorplans? With the UK's largest choice of homes, there's plenty more out there... You showed a lot of love for this home in 2025

The only 2025 round-up I will be posting.

Absolutely zero plans to actually move, no.

Why do sociopaths prosper in modern politics? Because they are the only ones who don't care about the answers that are given to gotcha questions. Is that the politics we want? Because that's what we're getting.

Sorry but this is exactly the gotcha style of questioning that inevitably brings democracy into disarray. Governments can't actually say everything they want about foreign leaders because that is diplomacy. Headline either way. And unscrupulous leaders who don't care are the winners.

Supporting refugees' entrepreneurship is good, not only for their integration, but also for business dynamism in host communities 🔥🔥🔥 Slow asylum processes, work restrictions, and obstacles to accessing banking, are a lose-lose.

We check for such crowding out effects and find quite the opposite. A shift-share IV based on refugees across counties and their comparative advantaged across sectors suggests a positive multiplier effect: a 10% increase in Ukrainian registrations led to 2.31% more Polish firms!

Our paper is out as an Econ4UA working paper👇👇👇

PSA: if anyone in your life is trying to dissuade you from getting the shingles shot, you should probably assume that person hates you, and wants you to suffer. There is literally no other explanation.

Shingles hurts worse than childbirth. Worse than knee surgery. Worst pain of my life.

Someone pointed out that he got paid roughly £14-19k for this article, in which he complains about disabled people seeking aid following his fumbled response to a mass disabling public health event.

The entirety of British politics now just consists of all parties from across the political spectrum making increasingly deranged statements about how and why they are going to deport people

WHAT. THE. FUCK

📢Call For Papers📢
Sociability & Political life

Marc Jaffré & I are organising a conference! We're asking: can there be politics without sociability? How have friendship, intimacy, socialising & informal attachments been central to political projects & movements?

Get your abstracts in by Feb 14th!

Very arch.

Tbh I mostly do these because the Two Ronnies picture makes me laugh every time

This is a bit like when Matt Goodwin (who never knew better) and Paul Whiteley (who should have known better) tried to argue that the EU didn't boost growth *when you control for FDI flows*. Increasing FDI flows is why you built an internal market!

Cargo captain admits there were a few slip-ups

Good lord, he let these words go out into the world like this?

I… had no idea (and it’s definitely worth going in and seeing how this thread got to this point)

I live in Wales and today received my Join Us letter from Reform UK, complete with SAE which I posted back to them, immediately, empty. If every other person in Wales did this, Reform would spend over £1.5 million on postage. Not sorry. Join me Cymru.

Puffing my own post, it’s sticking because it shows him as a weirdo, and he knows it. Press (and public) pursue those relentlessly. bsky.app/profile/alix...

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

I don’t know about moderate, quite trad Cath, but I used to follow him on the other place and he’d stay stuff that would grind my gears, but also be just about interesting and pleasant enough (usually on non-politics topics) to not ditch. Clearly now one of the Fallen, brain sadly cooked by X.

If you’re a Briton born in 2000, and especially if you’re from London, you will also be strongly aware of a loss of patrimony. You are now priced out of your own city, which has become notably alien, declining from being over 70 per cent white British at the time of Blair’s election to just over a third today.

No surprise that Ed West thinks you have to be white for London to be "your city", but still shocking that the *London* Standard prints this stuff.

[NB 1/2 of Londoners born in 2000 were not "white British"]

www.standard.co.uk/comment/gen-...

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.