Rishi Sunak shouting over a protestor playing THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER in the pouring rain is peak Britain. 10/10.

The line that the EU elections are status quo and that center has held, downplays the shock to Fr and Germany and the agenda of Green Modernization that they anchored around UvdL embodied in Green Deal & NextGenEU. Chartbook 292 tinyurl.com/nhzujpkd

An under-discussed side-effect of the cashless economy is that sometimes the tooth fairy does not have a £1 coin when it is needed

Positive affirmation: I am just two weeks and one conference away from closing all those browser tabs in one go

In any case any journalist, analyst or Conservative campaigner using vote share to pitch a Right-wing Reform/Con bloc of 35-40% needs to face the fact that the election also set in place a Liberal and Centre Left bloc of Labour/LibDems/Greens with vote share of 50-55%

Really looking forward to this - do submit something if you have a paper in the works!

A short break from all the craziness going on around... This photo of birds on power lines from Dan Ilic looks like musical notation. So I tried to play it.

New issue of Renewal, full of great stuff (and a piece from me on economic narratives and our new government)

In the new issue of Renewal, Kate Alexander-Shaw argues that while Labour have now set out their diagnosis, as long as economic policy is driven primarily by their fiscal rules, the link from diagnosis to policy prescriptions will be broken. Free to read: journals.lwbooks.co.uk/renewal/vol-32…

"Labour’s policy prescriptions are at odds with their own economic diagnosis" - my piece in Renewal this month, free to read here journals.lwbooks.co.uk/renewal/vol-32…

Fantastic (and short) read on how data on ageing is mostly nonsense because “the secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death” theconversation.com/the-data-on-ex…

Journalists are meant to speak truth to power. That's our job. But what do you do when that power is your own news org? This thread (professional suicide note?) is about The Guardian & The Observer's future. Because it turns out you can’t believe everything you read on a poster.. 1/

Good to see this essay by Kate Alexander-Shaw from latest issue of Renewal cited in Guardian leader today: deserves to be read widely. It's about how govts need to connect diagnosis to prescription in economic policy & how Lab risks not doing so. journals.lwbooks.co.uk/renewal/vol-32…

Pleased to have a mention in this editorial today

new monograph out Routledge Books by an ✨all-star SOLID team🌟 on social policy & 🇪🇺 polity building!

I love John Burn-Murdoch ‘s charts - basically adding community notes for the whole public discourse

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🎉 It’s a wrap! The SOLID Project workshop (9-10 Dec) has come to an end, and what an incredible two days it’s been! Members presented their contributions to the upcoming Journal of European Public Policy JEPP special issue.

Looking forward to rounding out the Concepts in Political Economy course this afternoon with a discussion of... Crisis! Thanks in advance to my Solid Research Project colleagues for all the expertise we have developed together on this topic - the lecture practically wrote itself

A must-read this morning - JRF's Alfie Stirling on the crisis in UK living standards, and how politicians can (and must) respond