iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The recent David Campanale case may be of interest. The legal argument in the case seems to be about process (whether he was opposed/ousted for being homophobic or for being Christian) but the underlying argument seems similar.

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Jokubas Salyga @jokubassalyga.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

What happened to class, labor and inequality after the fall of the Soviet Union? My new book revisits Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania’s transitions — from Soviet rule and the 1991 revolutions to neoliberal restructuring and the rise of the far right in times of war. Out in March with Manchester UP!

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It definitely fills in two of the gaps of my article - I only did a limited job on the social market and the SDP after Owen's leadership and policy legacies. You demonstrate that there was a lot more to say on that and the link between the SDP and the Labour engagement.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I really enjoyed this article and you do a great job drawing out the ordoliberal parallels. The analysis of the multiple layers of party policy development is very useful as a complement to the Mudge analysis and the specificity of the SDP/Lib Dems.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

status quo policy prescriptions. There's a possible argument of state capture of regulatory regime benefitting parasitic established suppliers and large multinationals at the expense of dynamic new entrants. However regulation is a key state tool against this sort of power.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

into the dynamics of private provision and outsourcing (which the diagnosis situates as core to the problem) is the only possible solution. You see the same gap in the quoted D Lawrence essay. If that's your argument you need to actually make it. Otherwise it's platitudes to the left with

Why is this? A key problem is state capacity. Post-industrial reforms, including Thatcher’s privatisation, turned a directive state, which got things done, into a regulatory state. This means that we rely on an army of consultants, lawyers and third-party providers to deliver anything, from schools to high speed rail. A related problem is planning, regulatory and legal constraints which increase the cost of projects and slow them down, which further increases cost (as capital and labour cost more the longer a project drags out).

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I really don't understand this paragraph in the article which overlaps with the content of the Hinden lecture. If the diagnosis is weakened state capacity, how is deregulation the answer? There's a missing leap in the unsaid concession that rebuilding state capacity is impossible and thus leaning

The second camp is closer to Burnham’s powerful ally the first secretary of state, Louise Haigh, her adviser Nick Williams, and Josh Simons, the former Makerfield MP. It includes thinktanks such as the newly founded Centre for British Progress and the Good Growth Foundation. For this more centrist camp, the problem with Thatcherism has less to do with privatisation than the erosion of state capacity that resulted from it. “We rely on an army of consultants, lawyers and third-party providers”, because Britain has “forgotten how to build”, wrote David Lawrence, the co-founder of the Centre for British Progress, in a recent essay. The answer to Britain’s economic problems, according to this school of thought, lies in winnowing down the vast apparatus of regulations, particularly planning policies, that protect large and established companies, prevent startups from emerging, and are holding back a potential abundance of new homes and power plants.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Ich finde es dafür interessant, dass die SPD sich in die Mitte eine Grundsatzprogrammprozess findet und die CDU auch eine neue ('24) hat. Das Prozess hat eindeutig nicht funktioniert.

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Nick Garland @npjgarland.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Read the deductions on your pay slip, let your chest swell with patriotic pride

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

It is the resident who recognises and has to contest this false framing. Really terrible reporting by the BBC.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

worth unpacking. The interviewer presents that locals definitionally cannot be far right, that the far right must be an exogenous force intruding on the innocent community. Thus she refuses to engage with latent bigotry in communities and society and the long history of such reservoirs of hate.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This clip really exemplifies the logics that naturalise and normalise the far right. Not only does the interviewer editorialise to minimise the interviewee's lived experience of bigotry, she spins it as 'legitimate concerns' and resistance as 'minority views'. The mention of the far right is also

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Vitali is the most historically literate of contemporary Tory policy wonks. He has clearly read and spoken with Howell and other sources on what early Thatcherism was about. However, this false binary of neoliberalism and the 'ownership society' is exactly the stuff I've been publishing on.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I hadn't noticed before but Nottingham Theology (Milbank) submitted Blue Labour and Red Toryism as an impact case study in 2014. impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/...

impact.ref.ac.uk

REF Case study search

Professor John Milbank's research at the University of Nottingham has:

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A lot of intriguing topics and it's also nice to see the range of institutions represented.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Is the EDP is the oddest European supranational political party? They seem primarily based on regionalist politics and spanning a broad spectrum from centre left to right it's odd to bring together the Freie Wähler, 50PLUS, Renzi's Italia Viva, and Puigdemont's Junts, among others.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

From my experience, the academic Mantel heads prefer A Place of Greater Safety.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Salvini and Meloni primarily. The FdI and Lega have developed from where they and their predecessor parties were in the 90s and 00s. Of course, the value of analysis lies in no small part on determining which developments have actually been significant.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Can you recommend a reading (article, book, etc.) on continuity and discontinuity with the DC coalition? I recall this being a lively analysis in early Burlesconi but I'd be interested in work incorporating more contemporary developments.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I would be interested to see analysis of what appropriate consequences (and a timeline for such consequences) look like. There seems to me a reasonable expectation that whatever emerges will indeed by ineffective at restitution, deterring future rule-breaking, etc.

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sampallis.bsky.social @sampallis.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The Left needs to find a new idea of the future which is neither based on reindustrialisation nor deregulation. To do that, we need to confront the limitations of neoliberalism as an analytical framework and redefine progress in the face of climate change/AI/ageing population tinyurl.com/3swcy9bd

tinyurl.com

The left’s two nostalgias

Neither reindustrialisation nor deregulation can confront the future the left faces

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

If the IHS wants to learn from the civil rights movement, which this piece presents as clearly good, continuing to gloss over its (and its networks) own actions/thought in the period, as appears at the end of the piece, is probably not good coalition-building.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Not the only HPT person to have published on Tolkien durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1576281

durham-repository.worktribe.com

'Queer lodgings': gender and sexuality in The Lord of the Rings

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

It is impressive booking that they've got Labour, Tory, Reform, Green, and SNP figures at the post-Yarvin conference.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

'Cultural provocateur', 'intellectual provocateur', 'Britain's leading literary provocateur', 'provocative voice', 'tipped as next Einstein', 'philosopher exposing humanism as religious delusion', 'titan of the radical left', 'tiktok feminist firebrand'

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

There's more fun to be had when you look at the whole speaker list and how they describe some of them.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Harvey Proctor? That's an editorial choice

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

interested in more thinking on whether Charter 88 *were* correct in their contemporary diagnosis - but maybe that invites infighting when coalition building is the need of the moment.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I'm working to clarify my thinking on this theme and finding it helpful to conceptualise this as responding to the diagnosed overcentralisation of state power and monopolies in private power not with decentralist liberalism, as has been done before, but with a decentralist democratisation. I'd be

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David Klemperer @dmk1793.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I've written an essay for @ippr.org about why democratic reformers need to expand their horizons beyond trying to finish the work of Charter 88, and should now shift their focus towards rebuilding the public sphere and confronting private power 1/4

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Against Private Power: A Democracy Agenda Beyond Charter 88

Since Charter 88, democratisation efforts in the UK have focused on constitutional reform to change the internal structures of the Westminster state. Today, however, the major challenge for democracy...

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

personally annoying yet seemingly perennial Economist articles, the personal trajectories of key actors, and exciting recent work from the IPPR. @renewaljournal.bsky.social @ippr.org @npjgarland.bsky.social

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I've written a new blog on the contemporary/policy relevance of my new article on the history of ordoliberalism and social markets in British political discourse and policy. I identify four connected but not especially coherent topics: my Renewal article, www.benjaminjthomas.net/musings/thre...

benjaminjthomas.net

Benjamin Thomas - Three Waves Policy

The policy relevance of 'Three Waves': why should we care today about the history of ordoliberalism and social markets in Britain? 11 August 2026 It’s been a while since I wrote a blog but, on the oc...

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Just to add on what's missing because there is overlap with complaints about racialised businesses and supermarkets but you have often lost the bank, the post office, the community hall, the local clubs, pubs and nightlife.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Basically, don't think of the business case for these papers as traditional newspapers but instead in competition with the hyperlocal substacks/newsletters, but where being part of the Reach machine gives some additional resource and ability to scale some stories.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

I heard a talk from a relatively senior person at Nottingham Post a few months ago justifying similar, which looks like a new Reach corporate policy. It sounded like the vision was a reduction in staff and scope and that the maximise views model was no longer viable with search engine changes.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

workload model) as some primary supervisors claimed 80% responsibility and complementary 20% for second supervision while others, or with other PGRs, claimed 60-40 or 50-50. I don't recall if the committee actually instituted a cap or standardisation - processes are slow.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

During my time on a Research Committee, I was asked to produce a report/survey on how many PGRs each staff member had - the data had gone missing during a professional services restructuring - and the max was 8. There was also considerable variation in 'workload' (none was formally allocated by the

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I hadn't seen the NLP PPB before. Something could definitely be written on their economic and administrative policies. 'Abundance' feels anachronistic but there's also the hegemony of the minimal state.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The article benefited from being part of an excellent workshop organised by Grace Ballor and Mattia Ravano, to whom I am very grateful for the invitation, and really good reviewers, who helped me identify links with the social inclusion/citizenship literature that unlocked the Labour section.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

no part in the discourses identified and in fact being positioned as a foil against which ordoliberalism and social markets are articulated. The reception and rearticulation of ordoliberalism in British politics can then be a generative case study.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

thinkers. This resists the claim that the language of social markets had been colonised by social democrats and social Catholicism. The article also fits awkwardly with recent scholarly emphasis on the European Community as the key subject and vector for ordoliberalism, with Europe playing almost

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

3) In the history of ordoliberalism I make the case that ordoliberalism and social markets are more closely linked than scholars are wont to suggest. I demonstrate that engaging with the language of social markets brought British politicos into explicit engagement with ordoliberalism and ordoliberal

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

claims I have made elsewhere that ordoliberalism is important for understanding early Thatcherism, its adoption and legitimation, and that the moral and social components of neoliberal thought, emphasising here Vitalpolitik, were just as important as the 'pure' economics.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The article pushes against too fixed a reading of variants of neoliberalism as national cases, claiming that the framing of German neoliberalism and Anglo-American neoliberalism can obscure the transnational flow of ideas and the multiplicity of neoliberalisms within a context. I also redouble

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

2) In the history of neoliberalism, the article, and the special issue it will be part of, contribute to a literature on the heterogeneity of neoliberalisms, with different emphases and genealogies

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

political history, even as they make largely the same analyses and recommendations from earlier waves. Hutton sounds like Owen who sounds like Joseph. The article limits itself to explicit discussion of social markets and ordoliberalism, so there is plenty of scope for further research.

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Benjamin Thomas @benjthomas.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

come as the respective parties adopt more neoliberal platforms - Tories 70s, Alliance 80s, Labour 90s - they also often position the social market against Anglo-American neoliberalism. There's a tendency to claim their interpretation of social markets is wholly distinct from those earlier in British

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