I teach American history at Cambridge. Opinions strictly personal; for sober & authoritative tweeting consult @Cambridge_Uni, @CamHistory & @JesusCollegeCam
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The willingness of the media and much of the British establishment simply to ignore Mandelson's close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is absolutely incredible theguardian.com/us-news/2023…
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"Remember that black student yesterday, the one on the front cover, who was attacking white authors? Yeah, we made that up. Sorry."
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Every American historian uses this image to teach students about 'manifest destiny' and ethnic cleansing, but I would guess that most of us didn't imagine that the US government would unironically reclaim it in the twenty-first century
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Extraordinary scenes in the Commons tonight as Tory MP @kitmalthouse correctly accuses UK foreign secretary David Lammy of complicity in Israel’s crimes and warns him that he could end up in The Hague
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For those too young to have lived through what happened twenty years ago, a thread of self-styled left/liberal types endorsing the invasion of Iraq
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American followers! Feel like you ought to have views on the UK's just-announced election (4th July!) but too traumatised by your own electoral nightmares to spend much time on ours? This thread is for you! 🇺🇸🇬🇧☠️🧵
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Eighty gloriously unhinged seconds in which Jordan Peterson tries to sell Elon Musk on "the carnivore diet"
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Amusingly the BBC's Reality Check team have looked at Johnson's speech this morning and found that every major assertion was either previously announced, a lie, or a distortion of the truth - usually some combination of the three. bbc.co.uk/news/53236921
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Hard to think of one image which captures the cowardice, authoritarianism and banality of the Starmer regime, but I think this is a contender
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Richard Madeley explaining the plot of his new crime novel on Radio 2 just now is two minutes of pure joy, and the most @AccidentalP thing I have ever heard
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Can't speak for my employer but as someone who teaches history at Cambridge I'm ashamed of our connections with David Starkey and urge both the University and Fitzwilliam College to cut all ties with him.
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Curious that "top lawyers" seem more worried about the Montevideo Convention, which the UK has never signed, than the Hague, Geneva and Genocide conventions, which Israel has flagrantly violated and to which the UK is actually a signatory
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Congratulations to the students, faculty and passersby who ensured that when Suella Braverman came to Cambridge today there was no one for her to talk to save for her GB News handlers varsity.co.uk/news/27641
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A thread on the outrage (and worse) directed against my colleague Priya Gopal yesterday.
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Statement from nearly 100 @Cambridge_Uni academics on disgraceful coverage from @Telegraph of 'Decolonising the Curriculum'. Please share.
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Wes Streeting saying just now that voters are more interested in the fate of the NHS than Labour's treatment of Diane Abbott; but the two issues are inseparable, because a party capable of showing such cruelty & unfairness to one of its own is not to be trusted on *any* issue
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Amazing to hear 98 year-old D-Day veteran Stan Mincher on the BBC just now rejecting the glorification of war, and declining the invitation to criticise today's younger generation: "What a waste of time war is...there's no need for it, it can be avoided"
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Eighty seconds of pure pleasure as GB News brings Suella Braverman to Cambridge for a 'dialogue' on Gaza
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Lammy responds by dismissing the question as “unbecoming”, because parliamentary etiquette still matters to a man who is arming a genocide
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In today's Telegraph, struggling millennial/Telegraph columnist Sophia Money-Coutts offers advice to young people on how to break into journalism
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So just to be clear, the threat of Putin invading Poland, then Germany, then France, then the UK is so great that we should impoverish and immiserate our neediest citizens even more than we already have? And this is a 'liberal' perspective?
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Another caller just now - on the football phone in, no less - accuses the BBC of complicity in the genocide of Palestinians
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BBC interviewer just asks “are both sides culpable for the famine in Gaza?” There is NO justification in international law for famine and genocide and it is 100% the responsibility of Israel and its allies, and the interviewer should know this
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Even by the UK's low standards, the hypocrisy of our right-wing newspapers blaming social media for racist violence is off the scale
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Incredible chutzpah from Starmer just now to praise Diane Abbott, given that his henchmen did everything in their power to force her out of office barely a month ago
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The Tories have two clever ways of managing omni-gloom: they change their leader regularly, so each new Tory PM can say “I’m the fresh start the UK needs!” while continuing everything their predecessor did; and the media massively skews in their favour, especially newspapers
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First morning of the @UCU strike, a bloke comes up to us and says wryly that he supports us but we need to be more like the Hong Kong protesters. And then: "My name is Ai Weiwei." 😮✊🏼 #CelebritySolidarity #UCUStrikesBack @aiww @CambridgeUCU
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What's so incredible about Starmer's faction is that they are in total control of the party, have already vaporised the Labour left, are poised to win a huge majority, but still can't resist an opportunity to break the legs of anyone who briefly had some hope between 2015 & 2019
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Huge admiration for the way Cambridge students are handling media who descend on the Gaza protest. If you want an interview, contact them in advance and they may give you one; if you want to bring the far-right former Home Secretary for a gotcha, they'll turn their backs on you
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As you’ve probably heard, Sunak’s Tory party are miles behind in the polls. This because they’ve been running the UK for fourteen years and the country has been in the toilet (often literally) for most of that period: zero growth, austerity, Brexit, sewage everywhere, omni-gloom
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I mean genuinely most of us do not debate this, preferring instead to acknowledge the massive expansion of slavery facilitated by the federal Constitution
Historians today debate whether the United States Constitution was pro-slavery, and a new book by the Harvard law professor Noah Feldman enters the fray. nyti.ms/3jXyqn4
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Lisa Nandy signals that Labour won’t support the second stage of the Leveson inquiry into press corruption; @theipaper reveals Labour agreed to drop the inquiry as a condition of the Sun and Sunday Times endorsing Starmer for PM.
Thank God press corruption is a thing of the past!
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But this time it feels as if they’ve run out of road. The combination of Brexit, Covid, the cost of living crisis and the general dilapidation of Britain has made it very hard for Rishi Sunak to present himself as the change candidate
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Fair play to the grifters who wrote this racism report, the call for feel-good stories about "the slave period" was not on my bingo card
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What's amazing about watching Bernie visit TV studios on his UK tour is that the ideas he's presenting have been *completely* chased out of our politics since 2019, everything he says seems impossibly subversive to our political and media class
"what demagogues says is... dont look at the ruling class, don't look at the people who caused the problem. Look at immigrants.. people of colour.. gay people, look at people who might be different to you. You're supposed to hate them"
Bernie Sanders on #Ridge. Spot on, Bernie!
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Michael Ignatieff's infamous NYT magazine cover story from January 2003 (Ignatieff was founding director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights) nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magaz…
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"He can operate a stapler, he can put on a pair of trousers, he can turn air into carbon dioxide," etc. etc. But of course he can't do anything remotely left-wing because that wouldn't be sensible or competent
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Beyond the recent spat with Vance, the new pope has a longer history of calling out Trump and his cronies
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Wes Streeting at Tony Blair’s conference this morning refuses to confirm that the NHS will remain free at the point of use - under his tenure look out for ‘top-up fees’ for most of us and a bonanza for private healthcare providers
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On policy, Starmer’s Labour has become so right-wing that Tories have routinely ‘crossed the aisle’ to become Labour MPs; this is presented by Starmer as a virtue, rather than proof that his own party is now hard to distinguish from the Tories
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Wow Cambridge is on FIRE. I haven’t seen people this mad since we tried to give Derrida an honorary degree.
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And, alas, expect the forces on the fascist right to be emboldened by the failure of a nominally left party to challenge wealth and power or to do much for working people. And at that point, you will want to focus on your own election in November. Good luck to you, and to us!
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His opponent in our two-party duopoly is Keir Starmer, who has led the opposition Labour party since 2020. Starmer was a lawyer, then he was Director of Public Prosecutions - a sort-of national version of a district attorney. Then he became an MP in 2015
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Priya’s tweet is provocative, but it clearly says that white lives don’t matter _as white lives_. That qualification is everything. She’s not saying that white people don’t matter, just that whiteness shouldn’t be the grounds on which we defend our worth.
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Very much not here for "actually many of these guys were subtly critiquing imperialism" replies, please take that discourse to your nearest policy school thank you
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“When we see laws being passed to ban the 1619 Project…I think we have a problem of a very different scale”. Ta-Nehisi Coates on why @UNC’s treatment of @nhannahjones is part of a “much bigger debate”
CBS Mornings
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New Yorker editor David Remnick's "case" for invasion, 26 January 2003 newyorker.com/magazine/2003/…
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First in-person seminar this morning since 2019 (!). Sixteen students. Spent 30 mins going around the room having everyone do introductions. Last student: "My name is Will and I have realised that I am not in this class, I'm sorry and I should leave now." 😭
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When Corbyn was defeated, Starmer ran a flashy campaign to succeed him. His pitch: keep the left-wing policies, but with a more competent Labour leader. Starmer made the pledges below, won the election, then promptly shredded them while insisting that 'competence' was his USP
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This tactic won him plenty of fans in the media, which had been viciously anti-Corbyn since 2015. After depicting Corbyn as a communist, a traitor and/or senile, the media now presented Keir Starmer’s ability to perform basic tasks as somehow transformative
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Absolute respect to the UK history lecturer who decided to seek advice on academic integrity from Richard Madeley
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It sucks that the Observer invited Yvette Cooper to defend her outrageous proscription of Palestine Action, but this piece on the horrific treatment of one young activist is a must read if you want to see just how terrifying the security state has become observer.co.uk/news/national…
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Then in 2022 Liz Truss blew up everything, and suddenly Labour moved far ahead and the country’s hatred of the Tories seemed immovable - the moment when even a lettuce could be elected ahead of the Tories
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In case you thought Cambridge ceremonies were just for the tourists: the porters in my college have been delivering food to self-isolating students & announcing their arrival with an actual plague bell
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During the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, his left-wing predecessor, Starmer became a fierce advocate of a second Brexit referendum - a policy he forced Corbyn to adopt ahead of the 2019 election, and one which Boris Johnson used to destroy Labour with his 'get Brexit done' mantra
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We white people shouldn’t just be creating more space for Black people; we should be interrogating the entire system of race which has done horrific damage across centuries. That means admitting that whiteness IS a problem; our goal should be to dismantle race altogether.
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Goes without saying that virtually everyone in this thread continued to fall upwards thereafter; also that the effect of their work in 2003 was to legitimise the claims made more honestly (though less decorously) by the neocons - see Jonah Goldberg (from 2002) below
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Beyond irony that the BBC is launching its series on radical new thinking after Covid this morning by interviewing Tony Blair and George Osborne.
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This is just a tiny selection (from the US, not the UK); feel free to post more as a tribute to the groupthink that created this huge disaster for Iraq, the region and the world. Remember also that this doesn't include the talking heads on TV news who were overwhelmingly pro-war
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The backdrop to this is that here in the UK (as in the US) we have very little education on even the basics of race: most people have no idea that race is a constructed category with no scientific validity which was invented and refined principally to oppress people of colour.
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So many things wrong with US politics but in this situation you think they'd just have said, "Mr President, I think we'll do this speech indoors"
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New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, "The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club," 8 February 2003 nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opini…
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Whiteness is normalised: white people have the privilege of never being defined by their race. Whiteness in the UK and US is not & never has been a category of disadvantage. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s phrase, racial privilege is a “bloody heirloom” which white people silently inherit.
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Boris Johnson tries to shout down John McDonnell and is reminded that the last time he raised his voice the police had to be called.
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Lots of problems with the Atlantic's attempted takedown of #1619Project, including the fact that they're trying to take it down at all. What is it about this particular endeavour which has people so riled up? (Thread)
theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…
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But then the Tories under Johnson became embroiled in scandal over their flouting of Covid rules; these stories about Johnson partying while the nation couldn't attend funerals broke at the end of Nov 2021, which is the last time the Tories were ahead in the polls
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Ironically his team have just drawn up a "shit list" of issues which could derail their incredibly modest agenda; in an alternate universe a left-wing party would actually be making pledges about the stuff on the shit list, but that's not Starmer's Labour party
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As an American historian it is my duty to acknowledge that the past is frequently a gloomy place, but the levels of corruption & intransigence manifested by Giuliani & Kerik - and by so many others in the Trump circle - would raise eyebrows even in the nineteenth century
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With electoral victory seemingly assured by default, Starmer shredded his remaining leadership promises and made a virtue of dumping on the Corbyn years; he also ruthlessly purged left-wing party members and MPs, to applause from much of the media
politico.eu/article/keir-sta…
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Election predictions, for what they’re worth: Labour will win comfortably; Sunak will resign his seat and return to his previous career as a hedge fund manager in California; Starmer will struggle with the UK’s myriad problems and he’ll be under siege pretty quickly
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Listening to the BBC World Service grill some poor Chilean leftist about how Gabriel Boric lacks experience, is 'only a law graduate' and may crash Chile's economy; meanwhile the leader of Great Britain is *Boris Johnson*
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Literally reads like an Onion headline but THIS IS THE NEWS IN THE UK huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/r…
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This recent piece from the right-wing Telegraph nicely captures where we’re at in the UK: the Tories “need a breather”; Starmer is VERY unlikely to break anything while he’s PM; the Tories can get Britain back again in a few years & began the next chapter of their permanent rule
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Delighted that the FT has come out against our profoundly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, though these graphs and predictions make for scary reading if we get “the most distorted election outcome of any major country in the world” on July 4th
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And he reached out to Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere, writing ‘exclusive’ pieces for the Sun and the Mail and doffing his cap to the hate factory that comprises much of the UK press
theguardian.com/politics/202…
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Even Starmer’s media fans had to admit that he was strikingly uncharismatic; during his first couple of years in the job, before the brief apocalypse of Liz Truss’s tenure in Number 10, his supporters tried to make a virtue of his dullness
newstatesman.com/politics/uk…
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🚨PERMANENT-HISTORY-JOB ALERT🚨
Cambridge is looking to hire a lecturer/assistant professor in BLACK BRITISH HISTORY (I know!!) to begin in October 2021. I am so excited about this I'm going to need a short thread to tell you about it 🧵 jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/28549/
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Surreal weekend in which liberal media acknowledge that the Iraq war was a terrible idea but suggest that this was somehow unforeseeable, despite millions of people on the streets in 2002/2003 chanting "this is a terrible idea" while being dismissed by liberal media
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So easy to miss Pat Robertson's significance as an architect of today's train-crash culture wars, in part because the crazy shit he used to say/do now seems utterly normalised - this from my 2007 book about apocalyptic Christians
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Elie Wiesel, Paul Berman, Joseph Nye et al., "Liberals for War," 14 March 2003 nytimes.com/2003/03/14/us/th…
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Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer winner and NY Times columnist, "D-Day," 19 March 2003 nytimes.com/2003/03/19/opini…
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Last week Starmer announced a new set of pledges which are way less radical than the 2020 ones he systematically broke - he even put them on a card, which would be risky if they weren’t so tepid, vague and/or reactionary. Compare these with the 2020 pledges above and weep...
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Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, 3 March 2003 newrepublic.com/article/6677…
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So why do Black lives matter? Because Black people come into this struggle from a totally different place: they are perpetually racialised, discriminated against, defined by the colour of their skin. They never had the privilege of being able to forget or normalise race.
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We’ll get the election manifestos soon, but the Tories have already stolen some of Labour’s policies because Sunak and Starmer just aren’t very different
theguardian.com/uk-news/2024…
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I have never seen so many people wearing daft outfits in one place, and I work in Cambridge
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