William Davies

As​ Boris Johnson limped towards his final prime ministerial disgrace, his supporters in the Conservative Party and the press believed they had hit on a strategy for weathering the mounting economic gloom. With inflation now reducing the value of every pound by 9 per cent a year, it was no surprise to see unions representing transport workers, refuse collectors, teachers and telecom engineers, among others, begin to ballot their members to strike for higher pay. The political right immediately responded with oddly euphoric analogies to the 1970s. ‘Labour Isn’t Working!’ one Daily Mail front page yelled. ‘We regret to announce that this country is returning to the 1970s,’ the front page of the Sun said the same week. The aim in conjuring up this memory (at least among the over-sixties) was quite clear: if this is a replay of the 1970s, then the unions must be responsible for a large part of the economic disorder, so what’s needed is some strong, Thatcherite figure to come along and take charge.

The​ period of human history when European people could confidently characterise themselves as ‘modern’ lasted barely a hundred years, from the upheavals of the 1870s to those of the 1970s. This was the era in which the bureaucratic nation-state appeared to have been secured as the building block of geopolitical power, and the welfare state became essential to the pursuit of...

‘Perhaps we could start with you telling us what you understand by the term “plagiarism”.’ I don’t know how many times I’ve spoken these words over the last two years. Twenty or thirty perhaps. In my role as chair of the exam board in my department it falls to me to chair plagiarism hearings, and this awkward icebreaker serves as a way of establishing...

The​ slow reopening of the British hospitality sector over the past few weeks signals a re-emergence from the great closures of the last year and a half – hopefully, this time, a permanent re-emergence, though who knows? No economic sector has been hit harder by Covid-19 than hospitality, a category that officially designates hotels, restaurants and pubs, but which bleeds into other...

There​ are two types of people: professional social scientists and amateur social scientists. To put that another way, a central problem of social science is that, unlike natural science, your objects of study have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts,...