Dan Feather

'Historians of Cultural Diplomacy' going from strength to strength as we follow up our inaugural in person @britishacademy.bsky.social and @leverhulme.ac.uk funded event in Liverpool with an online event hosted by @lgmar.bsky.social at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Spending the afternoon going through the excellent abstracts we have received for this event in advance of a planning meeting later

Review now out on @hnetreviews.bsky.social www.h-net.org/reviews/show...

Whatever your views on Owen Jones, this is pretty disgraceful. I remember he went the Tory Party conference a couple of years ago, and while I think party grandees just ignored him and left to speak to teenage members, he was allowed to be there for the duration

I think Burnham would make a much better PM than Starmer, but the joke allegedly doing the rounds amongst some Labour MPs sums him up: A Blairite, Brownite, a Starmerite and a Corbynite walk into a pub, the barman says 'what do you want Andy'

Daniel J. Feather. British Cultural Diplomacy in South Africa, 1960–1994 The election of the National Party in 1948 and the subsequent implementation of its apartheid policy of racial discrimination saw South Africa gradually dr

Thrilled to see the first review of my book published in the American Historical Review academic.oup.com/ahr/article-...

Have a vague hope that the 'Mandelson Affair' might bring Starmer down. But the likelihood is he'll just be replaced by Wes Streeting. Theresa May replaced by BoJo vibes

Crisp early morning walk before the first big meeting of the new academic year

If Farage wins the next election, it will be down to one person. His name is Keir Starmer.
This thread explains why.
1. Destroying faith in democracy. The UK decisively voted out the Tories, only for Starmer to give us a Continuity Tory government, shamefully beholden to economic power.
🧵

Nan’s Not Bankrupting Britain (But Politicians Might Be) Pensions, productivity, and the myth of the migrant “drain.”

The UK is a country with a rapidly ageing population that needs vast numbers of jobs filling. For it to crash all migration downwards because the public are enraged about small boats is the definition of national madness. www.bearlypolitics.co.uk/p/nans-not-b...

Last but certainly not least for this plenary @lindsayaqui.bsky.social discussing Geoffrey Howe

Followed by Rachel Utley discussing Francis Pym

Great talk by FCDO historian Richard Smith on Lord Carington’s time as Foreign Secretary at #BIHG25

Reading for the long train journey down to Norwich for the British International History Group conference at the University of East Anglia

I'm passed the point of saying I'll never vote for this lot again, to the point I will actively canvas against them. You can't really argue they are better than the alternative when they pander to everything the alternative wants anyway

The Labour government’s capitulation to the far right continues

UK-based researchers in the humanities and social sciences are invited to our informative ERC Synergy Grants 2025 webinar on 8 September.

Draft B1 proposals may be submitted by 1 September at 12:00 for feedback during the session.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/4lTTx6x

I knew this Labour government would be bad, but I didn’t think it would be this bad. Reform tribute act now seems to be the approach.

Took a brief interlude from annual leave to deliver an invited talk to lawyers and civil servants in the UK Cabinet Office's Union & Devolution Directorate as part of their 'Constitution School' series

Historians dismayed by ‘scandal’ of BBC cutting access to... Critics say new limit to trove of information sounds knell for independent research

‘… social historian David Kynaston, told The Observer he suspects “a serious scandal is unfolding”

John Wyver, Ian Greaves, Erica Wagner and others on the growing battle to prevent damaging changes to the BBC’s priceless behind-the-scenes archives:

We will be running our next event on 23/24 October. This will take place online hosted by Universidad Complutense de Madrid (see CFP below). If you are interested in cultural diplomacy (broadly defined) please consider submitting a proposal.

A new Research Network - Historians of Cultural Diplomacy - has emerged from the @britishacademy.bsky.social/ @leverhulme.ac.uk sponsored workshop I organised in February. Thanks to the brilliant work of @lgmar.bsky.social we now have our own website: sites.google.com/ucm.es/hcd

In the night we reached 300 signatures. A rapid rise but also a clear statement from the community that this is a retrograde decision causing widespread worry about the future of research - not just of the BBC, but almost anything within its century-plus global and cultural reach. Please join us.

Yeah, I always thought the "graduate regret" is a narrative pushed by certain people and newspaper columnists... it's a different question entirely whether we should charge students 10k per year... But at a fundamental level universities are almost always good for young people.

Though I have to admit the BBC's use of acronyms is worse than most, and I work in a university! Find it baffling that X is used in acronyms for External!

*equivalent

refugees are being housed in hotel rooms that do not meet their basic needs: families are being housed in rooms with no cooking facilities, nowhere for children to play, frequent reports of mould, damp, vermin. if an MP can’t explain that to constituents what are we doing here.

Starmer and Cooper will probably be right there with him in a few weeks the way this lot are going