@matthewlbishop
Political economist @Sheffield. Co-Director @ODI Resilient & Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI). Home: Yorkshire. Heart: T&T. Does development, small states, drug policy. Co-presents Small Islands, Big Picture pod. Occasionally plays electronic records.
Image of the start of the latest blog post
Real war and culture war. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog analyzing the Brexit imprint of domestic responses to the Iran crisis, the hypocrisy & sectarianism of Reform's response to the by-election and the questions it poses for Labour: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2026/03/real...
I mean it was obvious. All he has to do now is promise a referendum on joining the EU and the Greens will be polling in the 30s.
Anyone wondering just how we got here vis-à-vis Iran could do far worse than read Steven Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men" which was written after 9/11 and explains why 1979 happened (and, by implication, why 2026 could be opening a pandora's box)
The obstruction of goalkeepers at corners in football is becoming ridiculous. A simple rule change would be that attacking players shouldn’t be allowed into the six-yard box until the ball is played.
All Reform need to do now is replace Farage with Boris Johnson and they've pretty much got the band back together
Brilliant restaurant. There are also about a million other places there that you just fall into that are pretty much as good.
The Man United team last night fielded players from Belgium, Portugal, France, Brazil, Argentina, Ivory Coast, Slovenia, Cameroon and the Netherlands. One of the two English players has Ghanaian heritage. They'll all be delighted to hear this. www.theguardian.com/business/202...
As the world heats, places become increasing unliveable. Who pays? #NomadCentury
Wrote this over a decade ago on £9k student fees and much of it still holds. The question is not “why should non-graduates pay for people to go to university?” but why have those who went for free offloaded the cost on to today’s young people: speri-blog.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog/2013/pr...
Plenty of French politicians simultaneously serve as mayors, both local and regional, while holding seats in the national legislature. Chirac was Mayor of Paris and a Deputy in the Assemblée Nationale and Prime Minster (and an MEP at one point).
Danny Boyle et al have absolutely nailed the 28 Years Later trilogy so far: it's really hard to see how these movies could have been any better, utterly breathtaking from start to finish
The US hasn’t been truly hegemonic since the 1970s
It's 2026 and we still haven't got to the bottom of the mystery of who, exactly, is telling students not to use subheadings in essays
Strong, if questionable, thesis statement, but lacking a genuine puzzle. Overwrought sensationalist writing. Low 2.2 at best.
The word “essay” doing a lot of heavy lifting here
There's an alternative timeline in football history where Man United never re-signed Ronaldo and Solskjaer is still the manager, delivering regular top-four finishes and decent attacking football with a team featuring lots of academy players
While many argue that dangerous criminals must be treated as such, and that this strategy is essential to suffocating Maduro’s regime, the truth is that this was yet another example of how Venezuelan suffering has been normalized, minimized, and tokenized …
globalvoices.org/2026/01/05/a...
Insightful podcast
Wrong Opin
open.substack.com/pub/johnacar...
youtu.be/yBFIz_N3wqY?...
Unimaginable pain and fear…and no end in sight? What are neighbouring Caribbean islands doing? What will they do? How long can this continue?
@janvoordouw.bsky.social
@strongercaribbean.bsky.social
@susangoffe.bsky.social
#Haiti
Loving all the pictures of groaning American Thanksgiving tables and wondering why stuffing our Christmas turkey with marshmallows instead of boring old chestnuts and caking our spuds in maple syrup has never caught on.
Up nice and early for day three of the Ashes test. Wonderful way to spend a rainy Sunday winter morning. Should be a belter.
Has there ever been a British footballer as criminally underrated as Scott McTominay?
So it turns out that demonising migrants and making it nigh-on impossible for refugees to gain citizenship isn't a great vote-winner for the left, after all www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...
Small point, but the Coalition didn’t seek to reduce the deficit nor did they achieve it. Their goal was to *eliminate* the deficit in a single parliament and they failed spectacularly while continually moving the goalposts and seeing debt rise by hundreds of billions more than envisaged.
Not sure where this institutionally biased left-wing BBC was hiding during the Brexit and Corbyn years
Er no, small businesses were betrayed *by* Brexit which pulled them out of a market of 500m consumers www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...
I’m old enough to remember when Liverpool won the transfer the window, everyone else packed up and went home and all the bookies paid out before the season even started
Incidentally, this was explained by my brilliant A-Level Economics teacher in the late 1990s: we shouldn’t view the railcard price as discounted, but rather the normal price; whereas it’s the absence of the railcard for business travellers that allows their prices to be drastically inflated.
