Will Jennings📉🗳️
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drjennings.bsky.social
Will Jennings📉🗳️
@drjennings.bsky.social

I research and write about politics, public policy, public opinion, polls, elections, geography, place, trust. I run on espresso.

Political science 71%
Sociology 14%
Pinned

Reposted by Will Jennings

GB voting intention results:

🟣 RFM: 28% (-2)
🔴 LAB: 20% (-1)*
🔵 CON: 20% (+1)
🟠 LDM: 13% (-)
🟢 GRN: 10% (+1)

*All-time low

Reposted by Will Jennings

On the eve of the Autumn Budget, our latest polling finds that *over half* of 2024 Labour voters who are 'finding it difficult' economically have now switched parties.

17% now back the Greens, and a further 17% back Reform.

🧵

And yes the senior dining room menu is still obsessed with pomegranate seeds.

Twenty one years since my first academic job here - still bumping into some of the same people too…

Back at the old place for the afternoon…
The Secretary of Defense, ladies and gentlemen

That did seem to be a notable omission!

Reposted by Will Jennings

The Reith Lectures, commemorating Lord Reith's approach to communications during the 1926 general strike.

Probably best to stop calling them the Reith Lectures if the BBC is going to behave like this.

Reposted by Michelle Everson

This seems bad...
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

This does seem to tally!
He’s a year older than me, also born and raised in London. He went to the same university but was a year above and went on to do graduate work at EUI. He then became an academic - I suspect his conception of the industrial working class was gained from TV and history books - and studying in Florence
It’s especially ironic because the lecture is exactly about the ‘paralyzing cowardice’ of today’s elites.

About universities, corporations and media networks bending the knee to authoritarianism. /4
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
All the supposedly progressive people saying 'Nigel Farage's racism doesn't matter. His fans love it'.

It matters whether the leader of the party leading all the opinion polls is an outright racist. It matters if he called black people 'wogs' and said 'gas them' to Jews. Not everything is a game
For the past decade, conversations around autism shifted from focusing around curing #ActuallyAutistic people to accommodating and accepting autistic people. We now live in the RFK Jr. backlash, which shifts discussions around autism toward prevention
www.ms.now/opinion/rfk-...
Opinion | RFK Jr.'s latest anti-vaccine move will cause untold harm to autistic Americans
The Trump administration is working toward treating autism as something to be prevented, rather than building a health care system that helps people.
www.ms.now

I must be an outlier: I live in a 'rural' area but also about 7 minutes drive from the local A&E.

Time/distance from an emergency department would be a fascinating measure in comparative studies of urban-rural political divides (one for @lawrencemckay.bsky.social!)...
This piece is really good- on why rural hospitals close, why there are a lot more closures coming, and what happens next (accelerating economic and population decline)
“We estimate that from the mid-2000s to 2022, exposure to the opioid epidemic continuously increased the Republican vote share in House, presidential, and gubernatorial elections.”

Chotiner:

Reposted by Will Jennings

my goodness:

Chotiner: who funds this shit
Ben Smith: How dare you ask such a question. Check your facts!
Chotiner: I have now checked my facts. A thread (1/381)
Ben Smith:
a man in a hospital gown with the words i 've made a huge mistake behind him
ALT: a man in a hospital gown with the words i 've made a huge mistake behind him
media.tenor.com
If Isaac Chotiner ever said this to me, I would move to the woods.

The who? 🫠

Westminster political commentary repeatedly tells the tale of a a northern industrial working class without *ever* recognising there is a large northern middle class or acknowledging the desirability of class mobility - of people being given opportunities to find better work than their parents.

Glasman has such a sepia-tinted view of class, and zero ability to recognise the way economy and society has changed - in good and bad ways. Precarity, the new working class - there is lots of good thinking about this. To call him a third-rate theorist would be an insult to third-rate theorists.
there's a lot to unpack here Lord Glasman

Neutrality is increasingly problematic in both theory and practice since X became such a toxic platform while so many people continue to use it to consume information.
Wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Feels more relevant still after today. And it’s a deficit of self awareness which goes far beyond some members of the BBC board.
there's a lot to unpack here Lord Glasman

Reposted by Will Jennings

Wrote this a couple of weeks ago. Feels more relevant still after today. And it’s a deficit of self awareness which goes far beyond some members of the BBC board.