Thanks Tim! Catch up soon?

Haha yesss cheers!

Thanks Ben!

It’s still embargoed for now but feel free to email me - Im happy to send it over

Thank you Jane!

I noticed that too. A disgraceful way to cover it tbh

Very happy with this!

Did you know, for example, that Croydon was once the home of Imperial Airways, which "placed the town on the empire’s maps", and compelled fascists with strong ties to empire to make it their home and organising base?

This @renewaljournal.bsky.social essay is so brilliant - the history of the British far right narrated entirely through its activities in Croydon. Every sentence makes it clear it was written by a scholar with a genuine love for history and for Croydon.

renewal.org.uk/articles/sub...

The opening paragraphs - it's like, I don't know, Shakespeare, or Beethoven. You know it's great. Everyone knows it's great. But then you encounter it directly, in its own context, and you can only say, man this is so great.

❤️❤️

Hahaha this joke alone means I’m going to have to listen to the podcast. Teeing it up rn

Thats part of it for sure. But one difficulty of the status loss concept is that it lumps toxic investments in patriarchy and whiteness in with more diffuse and sociological stuff that we can actually work with as progressives. Whereas ‘white people should be respected more’ I can’t and won’t.

Just to add, I think that theres i.a. an indirect path via declinism, which can be partly tied to local trajectories as well as some underappreciated stuff on autonomy at work, as touched on in the essay.

Yeah, agreed that purely pocketbook-based explanations fail (many people who suffer economically hate Reform and vice versa), and I have some sympathy for the status loss frame. But status as what, and lost how? ‘Status’ can get used in a crude, psychologising way, or in service of anti-antiracism.

So much talk about Reform voters, but I'm yet to read much about their lives beyond tropes and excuses ('legitimate concerns').

I've been back in the midlands to interview people and learn more. Here's my piece on them and Reform's attempts to present itself as a community-minded, pro-worker party:

This event is looking amazing and do give the @transitionsec.bsky.social account a follow - I hear there’s lots to come on the green transition and the political economy of militarism.

Hugely recommend this to my fellow early-career sociologists - I went last year and it was amazing.

I've been slow to share this because in all honesty I was a little bit hungover on Saturday, but I wrote the New Statesman's weekend essay this week, on why England's ex-mining areas have become especially disenchanted with politics:

www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

This is a very clear historical and current summary, and utterly damning. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

God, the number of people who were willing to believe that the South Yorkshire police were too woke to prosecute sexual abuse cases, when in fact the police force was itself an instrument of patriarchal sexual violence. It’s like a case study in the worst excesses of the British press.

...and obviously the marginalia are a delight and deserved to be preserved for posterity! Lots of her scathing notes from the 1980s about Gramsci being moralising and useless haha

For any bookbinding fans interested in the technical specs, Nat says he did a new perfect bind on the spine, then made a photopolymer plate to match the front and letterpressed it onto the new book cloth spine and did a foil imprint.

One of my most prized possessions is my mum's old copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, with her marginalia. Last year it sadly fell apart.

Turns out my partner has been secretly working to restore it, as a birthday present. Here it is, all rebound, with my mum's and my initials added on the spine.