jwestjourno.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand "what is going on with young men?" posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates...nothing at all? Yes, young men voting for the radical right is an important phenomenon. But so is young women going rad left at even higher rates.

submitted 3 days ago • 445 comments

You do sort of have to laugh, a bit, at the US government going 'it says here "funding to secure a second American century" - we can cut that, right? Sounds pretty woke, right?'

submitted 10 days ago • 59 comments

Have written about JD Vance’s Munich speech. In what may prove to be the biggest week for European security since 1991, it’s time Europe listened to what Trump and his Vice President are telling us. open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...

submitted 12 days ago • 160 comments

Insane.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

The impact of uncertainty or the converse is of growing interest to trade economists - though not easy to model particularly as investment figures are a bit of a nightmare. But the logic seems obvious. And supports my argument of a long time about the limitations of regulatory 'nimbleness'.

submitted 14 days ago • 2 comments

“This is bad, full stop. It creates a class of person who are forever excluded from civic life no matter how long they live here. It’s also a clear breach of the refugee convention.” Damn straigt, @colinyeo.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

submitted 15 days ago • 82 comments

Imagine a revolutionary method of transport which offers so many benefits but where the appropriate level of safety and vehicle maintenance is decided by Californian tech investors who are seeking rapid financial growth. Let’s talk about Lime in London! www.londoncentric.media/p/lime-ebike...

submitted 18 days ago • 39 comments

Sumption's position is upside down. A wholly domestic "human rights" regime is unjustifiable. It falls foulf of all of the objections there are to having legislation reviewed according to an open textured set of values that Parliament should already be weighing when enacting laws. /1

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

Whether's Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris or Kanye West declaring his love for Hitler, musicians on both sides of the aisle have embraced controversial figures.

submitted 20 days ago • 104 comments

From a straightforward comms perspective this makes no sense asns we've got three political parties obsessively overserving Reform voters on immigration. No one even knows how an alternative message would land because Starmer and Badenoch are just obsessively copying Farage's homework

submitted 20 days ago • 5 comments

🚨 🚨 NEW EPISODE!! Check out this astonishing fresco as @illexplainlater.bsky.social runs from THE FIRES OF POMPEII! Along the way: bingo cards, rewrites and Mariah Carey’s range. Listen now! illexplainlater.com

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

I think reading this anecdote and deciding that the sympathetic party is the 20 y/o screaming kid and not the career civil servants is a pretty good test for psychopathy

submitted 20 days ago • 37 comments

Exclusive: DfE has warned mayors their adult education budgets will be cut as part of government savings This means £30 million in adult skills and 'free courses for jobs' cuts coming next academic year feweek.co.uk/fury-as-dfe-...

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

From Oliver Darcy, @oliverdarcy.bsky.social February 05, 2025. www.status.news/p/trumpocaly...

submitted 21 days ago • 15 comments

Like other economists I'm being asked to comment on Trump tariffs. We should do so - it's our job. But first we should make the point stated eloquently here by @alanbeattie.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/c26b...

submitted 24 days ago • 19 comments

Events are moving so fast in the US, across so many different fronts, that I think this idea of the UK finding a 'delicate balance', or even configuring the issue mainly in terms of tariffs/ trade policy, is already becoming obsolete. news.sky.com/story/starme...

submitted 25 days ago • 24 comments

Don't be Canada, Mexico or China was the main advice on dealing with Trump on trade. As predicted they are first in line to be hit. Don't do a deal with Trump is next. He doesn't respect his own deals. That he signed with all three.

submitted 25 days ago • 19 comments

This was terrific fun.

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

Universities if you don't stand for diversity, equity, & inclusion, what do you stand for? Be brave, take a stand.

submitted 27 days ago • 4 comments

BBC Radio 3’s Saturday Breakfast show really is drek post-Alker, isn’t it? Am I just being pre-caffeinatedly grumpy?

submitted 26 days ago • 0 comments

You don’t see a 0% very often in polling - Brexit’s appeal, always narrow, has not expanded an inch (or a centimetre). And people who supported it at the time are mostly of the view that it made no difference. Few major political projects have failed so abjectly to become a settled consensus…

submitted 27 days ago • 28 comments

Best Democratic strategy note I’ve seen.

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

For The Session, hosted by @agoodbeerblog.bsky.social I wrote about the best thing to happen in beer since 2018: the fact that liking beer is boring again. www.totalales.co.uk/blog/2025/1/...

submitted 27 days ago • 5 comments

Fighting for my life to get a full sentence out with Nick Ferrari on LBC just now. We have to be realistic about safe routes: It’s a small number of people trying to come here & we desperately need people, too. youtube.com/shorts/M1OVO...

submitted 27 days ago • 128 comments

The rampant mainstreaming of Islamophobia in UK conservatism, and the lack of anyone really even bothering to comment on it any more, is quite something

submitted 29 days ago • 26 comments

I wonder why this story received next to no media coverage.

submitted 31 days ago • 6 comments

this sort of thing always shows up as much more expensive problems elsewhere in the system, as well as the certain misery caused. it's another sign of the way in which the system can't process some kinds of information.

submitted 32 days ago • 18 comments

Pretty clear by now that closer trade ties with the EU should be an easy sell and economically beneficial. But UK government lines remain rather tentative notwithstanding a recent conversion to thinking PEM could be useful... www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

submitted 33 days ago • 5 comments

Simon Case, freed from the shackles of the civil service, outing himself as a massive idiot.

submitted 33 days ago • 45 comments

Labour’s decision to muzzle regulators in the name of ‘growth’ will backfire horribly | Nicolas Shaxson

submitted 33 days ago • 24 comments

The UK govt’s interim appointment of - their words - a ‘former Amazon boss’ as CMA chair raises eyebrows. What does pro-growth competition policy mean to Labour? Is this a real push for reform? Or just ‘Davos theatre’? My latest alongside Luuk De Klein and Tono Gil. ionanalytics.com/insights/mer...

submitted 34 days ago • 1 comment

This was a fun one - me and @jwestjourno.bsky.social went to some very interesting places about whether a dose of sci-fi/fantasy can actually help convey historical truth better than a "pure" approach. Listen and watch in all the usual places!

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

Just days after Trump returned to the White House, Instagram is censoring abortion content. This is what Aid Access' account looks like right now - posts about how to get abortion medication has been blurred out.

submitted 36 days ago • 152 comments

Late to this from @jreland.bsky.social but these are essential paragraphs in thinking about UK regulatory policy. We're going to have get over the idea we can out regulate others. World doesn't work like that. ukandeu.ac.uk/the-strange-...

submitted 34 days ago • 11 comments

The apparent comfort of corporate executives to shift from a rule-based to an autocratic model of government is, obviously, disconcerting but it also reveals the latent power of the state (albeit negatively) - which should at least puncture the imaginative capture of capacity by business

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

The UK clean economy sector grew by 9% last year, vastly outstripping the national growth rate of just 0.1%. Meanwhile flooding cost the UK nearly £600m in 2023. The facts are clear: taking action on climate change is good for the economy. Doing nothing is bad for the economy.

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

a new and potentially effective antidepressant is great news, but it does worry me that the USA is steadily moving in the direction of an economic model where half the system is dedicated to the production and administration of drugs to allow people to cope with the effect of the other half.

submitted 36 days ago • 20 comments

Why do wrong-doing benefit claimants need special rather than general punishments? Why not same for tax dodgers? And when someone has been caught doing cash-in-hand shifts do you really want to make it impossible for them to find a proper job & get off benefits? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

submitted 36 days ago • 43 comments

Our latest, scheduled episode on ENLIGHTENMENT was recorded before the passing of writer Barbara Clegg last week. RIP.

submitted 40 days ago • 1 comment