The thing with Lib Dems is they're often far more socially liberal than their 'vibe' would seem to suggest. There's an octogenarian, quite prim and proper woman at my church who's a Lib Dem voter and she was one of the strongest supporters of registering the church for same-sex marriages.
I can absolutely see that he serves a purpose as a sort of outrider.
But at the same time he has an inescapable air of sliminess about him that I find it impossible to overlook.
Yeah Davey was there right at the start apparently
As a cis gay man who is always worrying about inadvertently speaking in place of trans people myself, I think Polanski ought to... have a bit more humility? It gives me the ick, for want of a better expression.
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong though!
I just find the way Polanski has made himself the centre of attention and been such a relentless self-publicist in trans rights spaces pretty gross.
The contrast between his and Davey's appearances at last night's concert is a prime example of this.
Davey, whatever one thinks of his broader politics, has been a quiet, humble, consistent LGBT ally his whole political career (as a young MP he played a role in the abolition of Section 28)
Might be a controversial opinion but I actually have more faith in Ed Davey on this than I do Zack Polanski
Yeah, isn't it the case that Tex-Mex is usually hotter than actual Mexican food from Mexico?
It's interesting because I would say that the inverse is true in the UK – i.e. socialists and social democrats need to rediscover the liberal heritage and underpinning of the British socialist tradition
I had such a great time last year so I simply must go again. Yes, I am a superfan, but she's such a great performer as well.
Just discovered Alison Moyet tickets for October go on sale tomorrow morning. Thank you Spotify for letting me know.
Hopefully I'll be able to see her in the UK this time instead of trekking to Eindhoven!
Blair obsessed with delivery and Brown believing that getting the macroeconomic fundamentals right was the priority. In this respect I probably lean slightly towards Brown, but there was value in both approaches and the combination of the two is what produced success.
I think that may also have been around the time that owner-occupiers became the majority? And not only does that entrench a new divide in society, but the pattern of development is such that it really starts to empty out the cities
There might be something in this, insofar as I think the bulk of Labour's hang-ups about class have their origins in that period
Manchester City Council election, 1969. Unthinkable now.
Taking this in an altogether different direction, in my view people tend to overlook just how competitive the Tories were in England's northern cities up until the 1970s
White rural voters in the North are just *far* more likely to vote Democrat than their counterparts in the South. I think that's more than a mere echo.
Really shouldn't underestimate just how right-wing white graduates in the South are though!
bsky.app/profile/nath...
Right, and white graduates in the South are still far more likely to vote Republican than their northern counterparts.
Georgia having two Dem senators now is more a case of 'white graduates move left from a very right-wing baseline + there are a lot of black people + comparatively few Hispanics'.
Also the North and South of England are like, nowhere near as different as the North and South of the US.
And I could point to many a northern constituency that has gone in the Tory–>Labour direction over time (in fact I am posting from one right now).
Yes, the major difference with the UK system is that the cohort you're left with by the time you reach that fourth year is much smaller than the cohort you started with in first year
I suppose it depends what your comparison is!
In France for instance, universities (bar the elite grandes écoles) are initially non-selective, so students graduate after 1, 2, 3 or 4 years depending on how they perform/their chosen career path.
(The one caveat I'd add here is that in the Arts and Humanities funded PhD places are already extremely scarce in comparison to continental Europe. The University of Leeds only has *five* funded places for the next academic year across all Arts and Humanities disciplines.)
bsky.app/profile/dani...
In order to protect academic positions and research funding you probably need to rationalise facilities, have larger course sizes, less small group tuition, more students going to uni for two years instead of three
bsky.app/profile/nath...
The UK sector's approach since the 90s has been to beg the government for debt mechanisms to enable 'continental' levels of HE participation at the pre-expansion UK cost of delivery, and that approach has quite clearly now run out of road
I think it's inescapable that there needs to be a rationalisation of the sector, because tuition fee-led expansion has proved unsustainable – but it ought to be a managed transition rather than the chaotic one we are tumbling towards
And Christian theology is so fraught with controversy precisely because it's trying to make sense of that mess
Snap
bsky.app/profile/nath...
But the Christian understanding of Jesus comes primarily from Paul, and the Gospels were written down after Paul
Although it should also be said that the modern-day inhabitants of Türkiye, despite speaking a Turkic language, have little in the way of Turkic ancestry (not unlike how English people have much less Germanic ancestry than was once assumed)
