Sam Wetherell

Trump on Starmer: 'Not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with' President Donald Trump criticised Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the UK's initial response to US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

He's literally right, in the sense that Churchill, as Air Minister, was one of the pioneers of indiscriminate arial bombing in the middle east in 1919. www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

What if the David Abulafia bot is the Skynet style singularity tipping point? Vast hulking killing machines burning down the earth to source barely coherent content for Spectator columns. Levelling cities to eradicate wokeness. Maybe that already happened some years ago?

What if the David Abulafia bot is the Skynet style singularity tipping point? Vast hulking killing machines burning down the earth to source barely coherent content for Spectator columns. Levelling cities to eradicate wokeness. Maybe that already happened some years ago?

David Abulafia: [ad infinitum] Have you considered prefacing this piece of writing with a slurry of racist diatribes?

Very much looking forward to reading and assigning this - @benjamin-bland.bsky.social's new article on music as a site of racial formation (rather than liberal integration) in modern Britain: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Even more incredible given in 2024 Labour got half a million fewer votes than they did in 2019, during what we all were told was The Worst Labour Result in Modern History (TM).

Oil, Nationalism and British Policy in Iran As new nations were formed from the declining British Empire, a murky world of diplomats, oil executives and spies were determined to maintain London's grip on…

By a PhD pal of mine www.bloomsbury.com/uk/oil-natio...

Also can anyone recommend anything something and student-friendly written about Britain's postwar relationship with Iran, particularly (but not necessarily limited to) the 1953 coup?

Refugee status to be temporary as Shabana Mahmood rips up rules on UK asylum Home secretary announces 30-month protection limit, with refugees required to leave if their home countries are later judged safe

Labour "shifting left" update: Agreeing to participate in a massive destabilising regional war while, *the same hour* announcing tighter border restrictions to limit future refugees from the same war. Somehow both infinitely barbaric and breathlessly provincial. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

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.

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...

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.