Dominic Dean

My pleasure and most definitely!

Crossing my fingers for you!

I'm sorry, that sounds awful.

Including the confusion of the Second Empire being headed by the third Napoleon.

Gosh, hope you feel better very soon!

I wonder whether he was consciously influenced by Brueghel here, because that looks very Brughel to me.

😯😯😯

It seems so! Well, one can only hope it will be a wake-up call for others re the potential scale in their own constituencies elsewhere - just a shame if Essex has to be the one that provides that call (I say this since I'm now an Essex person myself of course!).

I notice he is quoted as saying 'this decision, which seems to have come out of nowhere' (hmmm) and he sounds either genuinely surprised or doing a good job of pretending - if it's the former then frankly he should have been paying greater attention. But again, better late than never I guess.

I hope this might start a trend of MPs beginning to clock the scale of damage to their constituencies from university closures and putting internal pressure on the government accordingly. A shame that wasn't done earlier, but even a belated change in the right direction would be welcome imo.

Indeed - it's interesting to see which 90s cultural products are enduring (or, at least, have currency in the 2020s) and which have faded. (Perhaps predictably, Shakespeare in Love was a big deal in late 90s Stratford-upon-Avon!)

Me neither (see my reply) 😅

Ah thanks Gav, that it’s important context that I had not fully registered.

The first batch of coverage had Shakespeare in Love mentioned but, it is now a really problematic film for how this is the film where the Miramax Oscar campaigning strategy took off so now has a through line to MeToo as well as worst Oscar Best Picture winner chat...

I’m struck that among tributes to Tom Stoppard there was little mention of Shakespeare in Love. Clearly there is so much other more substantial output of his to celebrate; but it was a huge film for pop culture on release and for a few years after; I wonder if it has since faded from cultural memory

It is so good - my mind immediately went to it when hearing of Stoppard’s passing.

Yup. You need a strong counter narrative from the top. You will never get this from Labour.

If people value their own degrees, encourage their kids to go to uni, live in cities where the uni is an anchor of the local economy, enjoy products from cancer medicines to podcasts that come from uni research and *still* don't see universities as valuable, you can only do so much to join the dots.

I see posts calling on unis/academics to do more to make their case in public. I'm 100% open to strategies to do so...but it's not as though there's a lack of info about HE's value, whether in the form of data-rich analyses or eloquent articulation. At some point you do need those with ears to hear.

(Though I do think it's a factor more broadly in how different types of work are perceived, of course)

I get that and to be clear I think the comparison to the steel industry is a red herring. I take the original point that there is a nostalgic affection for traditional heavy labour that can distort the way certain people see the world, but I'm not sure that was a major driver for the steel bailout.

I'll have them know I'm VERY manly, I taught a whole lecture on masculinities just the other day. 😅

Absolutely!

Even if that original choice might be in some respects understandable, if not justifiable, it's a sign of how blinkered and backward-looking their project is that it still takes this as reason not to engage seriously in digital comms now, despite the blatantly self-sabotaging nature of this choice.

Labour's near-total and bizarre disinterest in digital comms is perhaps explained by effective digital comms tending to come from organisations that understand themselves as part of a political movement; Starmer's Labour foundationally defined itself as anti-movement politics in reaction to Corbyn.

-creating a new funding pot that HEIs could bid into to address immediate threats to regional capacity, etc. They could do a lot to stem the bleeding in the space of a few months to a year; but of course while they're actively making it worse (again, int student levy) there's little hope of that.

Not sure I agree. Ofc, getting HE on to a long-term sustainable footing would take that kind of work. But much of the immediate crisis could be averted by steps that government could take now, e.g. Removing int student levy, introducing some form of number control (even if initially in a crude way)-

Thank you very much. I'm sure we will.

This Labour government is tough on growth and tough on the causes of growth*

The article explicitly notes WI had had a trans-inclusive policy *since the 1970s*!