Let’s thank my need to get the car MOT’ed for my chancing upon a very interesting discussion about the OODA loop on the radio. For those not into military tactics, the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop was devised by a US fighter pilot in the Cold War to conceptualise ways of (literally and metaphorically) out-manoeuvring your opponent: essentially […]
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Let’s call this the age of Gloomy Dawning Realisation. Since the start of the year, every day has been filled with examples of How It’s All Going To Be, as various individuals and sectors click that what we have is what we’ve got. This seems an odd way to put it, especially since those of […]
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Guest post by Dr Jack Newman: Research Fellow, Department of Sociology This blog post summarises the argument of a new paper: Newman, J. and Hayton, R. 2021. ‘The ontological failure of David Cameron’s ‘modernisation’ of the Conservative Party’. British Politics. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-021-00159-7. When the twin crises of Brexit and COVID eventually begin to subside in the UK, […]
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Something’s bothering me about Brexit. The main thrust of Johnson’s time in Number 10 has been ‘getting Brexit done’, which I have always taken to mean ‘getting Brexit off the front pages so we can get back to some more interesting/important thing’. This has manifested itself in Johnson’s lack of engagement with the detail (or […]
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This week, the government published some commissioned research on the financial impact of Brexit on UK universities. The work looked at the likely impact of changing demand from EU students in response to various changes in fees and finances. The broad picture of the impact was that while numbers would fall markedly, that would be […]
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Earlier this week I found myself getting a good corrective. Of late, I’ve been reading a lot of legal text and wondered idly if I was, in fact, becoming some kind of legal scholar. Two hours with the Lords EU Committee and three actual, proper (and amazingly well-informed) fellow witnesses were more than enough to […]
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