Kate Alexander-Shaw

Just...

utterly grim.

Britain through the looking glass: my dead goldfish is now a registered waste disposer | George Monbiot Algernon Goldfish is long gone, but I was able to sign him up. No wonder so many crooks are illegally dumping and ruining our environment, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The catastrophic illegal waste dumping in Oxfordshire (see next post) is a direct result of the deregulation-by-stealth I wrote about in 2021, when my dead goldfish became a registered waste disposer. I warned it would let the mafia in. And here we are.🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Astonishing piece by the brilliant @alisonkilling.bsky.social

I REALLY need to finish my paper on how we can understand "fiscal headroom" as a politically constructed space bounded by an invisible electric fence

Exciting to see this in print - the first article of our special issue on EU crisis politics and polity formation, by Hanspeter Kriesi in @jeppjournal.bsky.social. Lots more to follow...

The Smelter and the Sovereign The critical minerals story is another way in which Europe’s green transition is a loser in the geoeconomic turn

If you care about geopolitics, decarbonization, and why Europe seems lost, you can do a lot worse than subscribing to this blog. It's brilliant: substack.com/inbox/post/1...

New tariffs for Venezuela in 3...2...1...

I just have no idea who the Tories think the audience is for full bore authoritarianism plus austerity. Very few who want the former want the latter.

Where now for Britain's Universities? Although the financial crisis facing the United Kingdom's universities is by now well known, the detailed reasons behind it have been less prominent in public and political debate. It is true that fr...

As the new academic year begins, here's an important and bracing read on the crisis in UK universities, by Glen O'Hara for @politicalquarterly.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A must-read this morning - JRF's @alfie-stirling.bsky.social on the crisis in UK living standards, and how politicians can (and must) respond

Excellent from @dandrezner.bsky.social on Wall Street's under-reaction to Trump's erratic economic policies: "in this scenario, markets are not leading indicators but lagging indicators of how government policy affects the real economy"

I’m reminded of Andrew Marr’s observation that when a headline contains a question, the answer is nearly always ‘no’

Side note: the new crop of undergrads were born in 2006-07, so teaching this stuff means finding ways to bring the pre-crisis era to life, for a generation who haven't seen either the politics or the economy be better

The political economy of the 2020s can all be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis - discuss

The Great VAT Panic Or how not to run a campaign

New post just out:

"The Great VAT Panic"

The claims made by the right-wing press about VAT on private school fees were wildly wrong.

Why? What are the lessons about about (how not to) run a lobbying campaign? And what can government learn?

(£/free)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...

Me: let’s take the kids travelling, I want them to be citizens of the world

Also me: pack the good teabags, while there is breath in my body I will not entertain Lipton Yellow Label

Brand new research findings from my clever colleagues - and the best “Check out my paper it is V Good” thread you will read all year

This thread is a masterpiece - chapeau, Zbig 😂

One additional observation: a process this dysfunctional burns so much goodwill between HMT officials and their departmental oppos. Once the dust settles you spend the next year trying to rebuild relationships and then do it all again

Essential reading for Whitehall nerds. I worked on SR2004 and it was exactly this bonkers, and that's when there was lots of money in the system

📢 Coming this Wednesday - the next in this online series, with Quinn Slobodian. Really looking forward to this one - do sign up if you haven't already

Starmer doesn't seem to realise that, if you consistently accept the way your opponents frame a question, you'll find it hard to reject the answers that they give.

If you keep telling voters that Farage is right in his analysis, it will be hard to persuade them that he's wrong in his prescriptions.

Keir Starmer is caught in yet another trap of his own making | Rafael Behr The prime minister’s immigration approach follows a now-familiar pattern: letting fear of a difficult argument get in the way of policy that might work, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

🎯
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Wow. Every line of this

If the renewable fuel of your politics is keeping people angry, your main goal is not to make things better; it's to win the blame game over why they are bad

This initial wrecking phase may dismantle federal agencies, but I suspect next phase replaces them with privately-owned firms delivering what used to be public functions (thinking here of Brett Christophers' chapter on contract rents in the UK). So macro impact may be reduced, but social impact...

"The electorate needs to believe that Labour is governing in pursuit of a shared purpose, not simply governing because it won." Good stuff from @craigpberry.bsky.social

Why Trump Says He’s ‘Not Joking’ About a Third Term The prospect of smashing imagined limits on his power gives him an obvious thrill.

The Constitution is clear that Donald Trump cannot run for a third term as president, Jonathan Chait writes. "But as Trump has repeatedly demonstrated, questions of the law and the Constitution ultimately reduce to power struggles."

Really thought-provoking, especially on whether Trump’s kick-over-the-sandcastles economic strategy is a paradigm shift or just a mess

Really excellent seminar series coming up - first session tomorrow!