Ben Worthy

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This is an excellent and very grounded summary of why you can't bomb to win.

"Tried to convince us there were rockets that could reach Scunthorpe" as the great Martin Burch said to me.

International Relations Is Not a Morality Play: What to Expect From the War With Iran The Trump administration has no plan and no path to a good outcome.

Iran ≠ Iraq

"Many observers will note parallels to the 2003 Iraq war, with the US launching an unprovoked assault on a Middle Eastern government while denouncing an 'evil' regime pursuing weapons of mass destruction it does not currently have. But the differences are striking."

I count at least 5:

My many enemies will be pleased to know that I have once again become entangled in a bead curtain

From representation to meritocracy: Understanding professionalization of the political class through UK parliamentary pay debates, 1911–2011 Abstract. Observers frequently point to the rise of “professional politicians” as a source of public distrust with political elites. This attitude is roote

Some new published research from me (first in a while!).

I looked at a century of debates on legislator pay to see how British MPs justified their own salaries. These debates provide a unique window into how Parliamentarians navigated the transition to professional politics. doi.org/10.1093/pa/g...

bsky.app/profile/seth...

Fun fact: the dining room at Mar-a-Lago, built in the mid-1920s, was dubbed "the Mussolini room" by its designer because it was intentionally modeled after Rome's Chigi Palace that was occupied at the time by Il Duce.

Que sais-je? Michel de Montaigne, French Renaissance philosopher, whose gentle scepticism shaped European thought; born #OTD 1533. Many books originally in his library at Tour Montaigne are now in the University of Cambridge Library @theUL.bsky.social

Over the past eighteen months, the political science consensus on the nature of Labour's vote has been absolutely correct - and yet also completely ignored by pundits and strategists who continue to get it wrong.

Article - Nuffield Politics Research Centre

@martamiori.bsky.social and I have been writing, since 2024, about why Labour's 'Reform' challenge and emphasis was based on a misunderstanding of Labour's vote. Here for anyone interested: politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

I love the cover image for this special issue (which I may have had a hand in choosing). It shows 11 survivors of Peterloo assembled at Failsworth near Oldham in 1884 in support of parliamentary reform, and speaks to many of the themes contained in the special issue.

Strong language here from one of the nation’s leading constitutional experts on this legislation

The Professor Will See You Now: Recycling Lessons in political science. This week: recycling

Latest piece for the @thehousemag.bsky.social - on the Potemkin consultations run by local government. (And others...).

www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...

Cover of book with text in yellow reading: The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, overlaid on an image of an angel in seventeenth-century dress with wings and a long gun.

Hello Bluesky! My new book, THE FIREARM REVOLUTION, is out on 14 April. It’s about how a new technology changed society, and how hard it was to control. Here’s a little thread of what’s inside:

What is THE BRONTES WENT TO WOOLWORTHS and can it possibly live up to its title?

Councillors assembling at the St George’s Centre.

Good evening.

I’m here for tonight’s Medway Council budget meeting, where the finances will be set for the current year.

I’ll be liveblooting it from 7pm. Join me!

What has Reform learnt from its first taste of power? [FREE TO READ] After grabbing hundreds of local council seats from Labour and the Conservatives, the populist party has faced a reality check

This is not a “haha aren’t they stupid” article. Reform said that local government will be the litmus test for No 10. The polls are what they are, so that should take seriously. So I’ve tried to sum up what their approach to finance so far can tell us

as.ft.com/r/407ee315-6...

What has Reform learnt from its first taste of power? After grabbing hundreds of local council seats from Labour and the Conservatives, the populist party has faced a reality check

Really good @financialtimes.com piece from @jenwilliamsft.bsky.social on what happens when Reform rhetoric meets local government reality.

Reminds me of my time working at Cambs County Council through the 2013-17 Tory/UKIP coalition.

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

The number of people held in ICE detention on any given day rose by over 75% in 2025, with a record 73,000 people being held in detention as of mid-January.

And with Congress authorizing $45 billion in new detention funding, the system could more than triple in size over the next four years.

Coming soon to a warehouse near you

Ok, so a few things to flag this week on foreign trips and freebies:

In essence: Palantir commercially colonised the Ministry of Defence because the Ministry of Defence let them.

US citizen shot and killed by federal immigration agent last year, new records show Shooting death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, in Texas was not publicly disclosed by Department of Homeland Security

An ICE agent shot and killed 23-year-old U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas almost an entire year ago and hid the shooting from the public.

It’s only now coming to light, 11 months later, due to Freedom of Information Act requests.

What else is the regime hiding from us?

Misconducting in public office An ancient offence in the news - and how it usually is used only for junior officials

NEW

Misconducting in public office

An ancient offence in the news - and how it usually is used only for junior officials

By me

emptycity.substack.com/p/misconduct...

Martin on Erskine Childers - best-selling novelist and an Anglo-Irish convert from Boer war imperialist to Irish Republican, who was tried and executed by the Irish Free State during the 1922 Irish civil war - and his son Erskine Hamilton Childers (President of the Republic, 1973-74)

The extraordinary story of the Howth Gunrunning Shortly before noon on a hot, blue-skied Sunday morning in July 1914, a white sail floated out from behind Lambay Island and began to nonchalantly make its way towards the small port of Howth, on the ...

Childers smuggled guns to Howth, Ireland in July 1914, as a defender of Home Rule, with maximum publicity as a symbolic response to guns being delivered to Ulster. He was in the Admiralty in 1916, when those guns used in the Easter Rising. He later joined Sinm Fein in 1919
www.rte.ie/news/2014/07...

New research by Karen McBride, an accounting professor at the University of Portsmouth, argues that the weekly Bills of Mortality acted as an early public health information system, shaping how some Londoners navigated life, work and survival during the Great Plague. Drawing on the diary of Samuel Pepys, the study suggests the published death figures were used as "quite practical decision guiding accounts or data of what was going on". The Bills were issued weekly, listing deaths by parish across the capital. They were posted publicly and sold on street corners, allowing readers to compare week-on-week rises and falls.

How Londoners used data to survive the Great Plague www.bbc.com/news/article...

A journal of the plague year: Samuel Pepys and the Bills of Mortality as accounting doi.org/10.1177/1032...

Bills of mortality en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bills_o...

#publichealth #deathstats proto- #opendata

Help us improve Open Government Licensing guidance The National Archives oversees the UK Government Licensing Framework, helping both public sector information providers and people who re-use this data to understand their rights and responsibilities. ...

If you’re interested in open government data, please read (and repost) www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blogs/digita...