Sam Wetherell

As I knew it would be, it is just so fucking funny reading these posts today. Toeing this line, to the point of alleged electoral fraud, is the tactical equivalent of putting your entire head inside the cannon to make sure its working as the fuse ticks down.

There are like three days every decade in which I’m actually excited to hear what Chris Mason is going to say.

Not to mention flooding the public sphere with nonsense, reactionary sensational garbage about drug decriminalisation.

I have deleted to be safe. The image of the van in the original tweet likely depicts Labour canvasser with a Labour sticker. It could be some crank but its in line with a) Labour's bizarre enthusiasm for committing fraud in this election and b) their absurd hard right recent messaging.

Source seems fairly legit. Also pretty li line with their recent message - that attack video etc… happy to be proven wrong of course I’ll keep an eye on original source x.com/turnleftmedi... a

A political project pitched to a pliant media as one that would fundamentally remake a nation in terminal decline in a ten year phase of government, resorting now simply to repeating "they want to smoke drugs!" in an increasingly panicked voice.

This is slightly more recent. Can't remember if it was written after the transfer or not. www.jstor.org/stable/43917...

‘Apply the Flame More Searingly’: The Destruction and Migration of the Archives of British Colonial Administration: A Southeast Asia Case Study In 2011, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office formally acknowledged that it held records of local colonial administration that had been removed from their repositories prior to independence and eve...

Teaching this today. If I had an infinite budget I've always thought the best way to teach students about British archives, power and decolonisation would be to give them 1 million sheets of paper and tell them they have a week to destroy them all with no a trace.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

From @jonathanliew.bsky.social’s thoughtful piece on Goodwin and Gorton and Denton. It is so obvious that the catastrophe of Reform is in part a response to Labour’s desperate lack of political imagination. Farage will be Starmer’s primary political legacy. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Play with the vestigial, provincial and implicitly racialised theory of class beloved of new Labour and the right and you will get burned.

I’m a Green Party member, I think Hannah Spencer is amazing and I hope she crushes Labour and Reform. But branding her with a theory of class that was a vague, under-theorised residual holdover from the twentieth century always risked this kind of nonsense.

a woman is ice skating on a rink with the olympic rings behind her ALT: a woman is ice skating on a rink with the olympic rings behind her

My three year old twenty minutes after I’ve called nursery to say she is too sick to come in, then cancelled all my work meetings.

Two times this week my three year old has done this incredibly adorable, hilarious thing where she wakes up for no reason for the day at 3am.

What America did through ideology, the UK does in order to get a budget projection that we don't even really care about

Congrats Theo great to see this out in the world!

Just published open access in @globalhistjnl.bsky.social

‘Inside the belly of the monster’: The politics of race in Britain, transnational anti-colonialism, and the Black Liberation Front

doi.org/10.1017/S174...

UK ban on Palestine Action ruled unlawful Ministers argued the direct action group engaged in a campaign of criminal damage and violence

Hell yes. www.ft.com/content/ed06...

That's the long answer. The short answer is he could have said words to the effect that Ratcliffe is a risible racist clown without making any historical claims at all.

I mean my job is not to write press releases for Andy Burnham. But I do think my/our role is, to some extent, to critically interrogate the claims made about the past by senior political officials and the basis made for those claims, right?

How disappointing!

I think the difference ultimately is that I believe we should the line against (and interrogate), rather than recognise those influential uses! But this has been enjoyable distraction from marking. One day we can have this conversation with louder voices in the pub.

Well exactly, and Andy Burnham's job is not the same as ours! It is not our job to let our response to historical claims be shaped by the same short-term calculations that might produce a hastily written press release.

The thing that allows Manchester to fetishize abolition is partly the imagined distance from the violence that the city was implicated.

And this is despite the fact that Richmond was involved, during the Civil War in what was probably the great instance of radical Black labour history - what DuBois calls the "general strike" of the enslaved which made abolition central to the war.

As a thought experiment, it is difficult to imagine the mayor of, say, Richmond, VA, a city equally formed by slavery during a similar period, arguing that Richmond had a centuries long history of people from different races "pulling togther." At least not without a major pushback or qualification.

You are putting a lot of words in Burnham's mouth here! Maybe this is what he meant, maybe not? You are right that this may be the most charitable of that historical claim but I'd qualify that with a few points:

And third while this may seem grandiose, our job as historians is to properly interrogate the claims about the past that important public figures make and think about the work they might do rather than bracketing them off as expedient or otherwise.

Second, I would argue that the constituency for that claim is global, touching every part of the ruined world that Manchester made. It is a claim whose stakes are much higher than the management of the social formation of a handful of neighbourhoods in Manchester itself.

First, I simply don't think that claiming that *Manchester*, the second city of what was arguably the largest, most ruthless and most violent empire the world has ever seen, was the site of a centuries long harmonious multi-racial project is helpful, even as a knowing myth.