Kate Alexander-Shaw

With this White House, I suspect Phase 3 remains as it ever was

We don’t like or approve of most of the people in this constituency, but we definitely should have won

What’s in a crisis? Taking contestation seriously in the study of Europe’s crisis politics - Comparative European Politics Comparative European Politics - The study of European politics has taken a crisis-oriented turn. Yet despite a proliferation of new empirical research, crisis remains undertheorised as a unit of...

The study of European politics has taken a crisis-oriented turn. Yet despite a proliferation of new empirical research, crisis remains undertheorised as a unit of analysis in European studies

@katealexandershaw.bsky.social, Joseph Ganderson & Anna Kyriazi explore

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Extraordinary images and reporting

Beyond Incrementalism: Can the Politics of Abundance Work for the United Kingdom? The abundance agenda offers an important provocation to progressives, asking them to think big about the possibilities for growth and economic renewal. Developed in the context of the United States, ...

New piece from me, on the politics of 'abundance', in IPPR Progressive Review (currently free to read) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is a thorny area and I am not an expert. But one insight from being a primary school governor: getting an EHCP requires evidence the child's needs are not being met - evidence of ongoing failure, essentially. This can take until Y6. For it then to be up for reassessement in Y7 would be awful

I'm sorry but it's very funny to me that the legislature of a G7/P5 country of 70 million is currently drafting the "Fuck This One Guy in Particular Act of 2026."

Also, imagine tolerating a system of privilege so entrenched you need to rewrite centuries-old rules just to get at one douchebag.

Attacking Universities Is Now a Populist Position. We Must Redefine Their Moral Purpose Britain's universities face an acute financial and moral crisis.

In an era of populism, universities make an easy political target. Public opinion reflects a growing suspicion, with research-intensive universities distant from ‘left behind places’ .

A solid base of citizen support is urgently needed to survive.

Ok that's pretty terrible

Ooof. New to me, but the difficulties getting reviewers are absolutely getting worse. At least you can take it elsewhere swiftly, rather than wait 4 months for reviews that misunderstand the paper because they couldn't find relevant experts

New article by my brilliant colleague Anna Kyriazi, on the EU’s membership crises

But pessimistic forecasting does affect the fiscal envelope at budget time, which affects funding for public services, the state of which certainly does affect public sentiment, so maybe that's the causal chain. If anyone more quant-skilled than me has measured these effects, I'd love to see it 3/3

I'm not convinced the public pay enough attention to ONS data releases, or press coverage of them, for it to distort overall sentiment on the economy 2/3

Really interesting read on how forecasting errors have all been in the same direction lately (data revisions routinely have output as better than expected, esp after crises) 1/3

Discussing @neilshearing.bsky.social's "fracturing" thesis with my political economy students this week - if we're at an inflection point for globalisation, where next?

I suspect it's a topic that would benefit from an outsider viewpoint...

write it!

This is exactly what the recent Trump-BBC 'scandal' was designed to achieve. The BBC is now self-censoring criticisms of Trump in the name of "impartiality"

I worked on the independent Lyons Inquiry into local govt finance. We recommended council tax rebanding (with appropriate smoothing through transitional arrangements, and new top bands) in 2007. Even then it was considered too politically risky so the can got kicked down the road for another 18 yrs

Just...

utterly grim.

Britain through the looking glass: my dead goldfish is now a registered waste disposer | George Monbiot Algernon Goldfish is long gone, but I was able to sign him up. No wonder so many crooks are illegally dumping and ruining our environment, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The catastrophic illegal waste dumping in Oxfordshire (see next post) is a direct result of the deregulation-by-stealth I wrote about in 2021, when my dead goldfish became a registered waste disposer. I warned it would let the mafia in. And here we are.🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Astonishing piece by the brilliant @alisonkilling.bsky.social

I REALLY need to finish my paper on how we can understand "fiscal headroom" as a politically constructed space bounded by an invisible electric fence

Exciting to see this in print - the first article of our special issue on EU crisis politics and polity formation, by Hanspeter Kriesi in @jeppjournal.bsky.social. Lots more to follow...

The Smelter and the Sovereign The critical minerals story is another way in which Europe’s green transition is a loser in the geoeconomic turn

If you care about geopolitics, decarbonization, and why Europe seems lost, you can do a lot worse than subscribing to this blog. It's brilliant: substack.com/inbox/post/1...

New tariffs for Venezuela in 3...2...1...

I just have no idea who the Tories think the audience is for full bore authoritarianism plus austerity. Very few who want the former want the latter.

Where now for Britain's Universities? Although the financial crisis facing the United Kingdom's universities is by now well known, the detailed reasons behind it have been less prominent in public and political debate. It is true that fr...

As the new academic year begins, here's an important and bracing read on the crisis in UK universities, by Glen O'Hara for @politicalquarterly.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A must-read this morning - JRF's @alfie-stirling.bsky.social on the crisis in UK living standards, and how politicians can (and must) respond

Excellent from @dandrezner.bsky.social on Wall Street's under-reaction to Trump's erratic economic policies: "in this scenario, markets are not leading indicators but lagging indicators of how government policy affects the real economy"