Ben Judah

Writer & Visiting Fellow @ChathamHouse. Former Special Adviser @FCDOGovUK and @MOJGovUK. Observations:

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

Excited for a new chapter today starting at @ChathamHouse as a Visiting Fellow working on Britain in the world — 🇬🇧

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

@joshglancy Such a shameful waste of public funds going on at the BBC.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

Absolutely right and so glad he’s said it.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 BREAKING: Andy Burnham says the assisted dying debate should wait until after palliative care and social care is fixed

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

Interesting project:

[IPPR @IPPR]

The populist right offers belonging through exclusion. Our new political project argues the left needs to offer belonging through contribution instead — #reciprocism, not nationalism.

Read here: https://t.co/XfhVeqDxnM

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

And there’s a plague of anxiety, depression and loneliness — I’m told?

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

A very strong appointment:

[Stewart Wood @StewartWood]

It's a huge privilege to take on the role of Foreign Office Minister leading the FCDO's work on Europe, international security, defence & growth. Britain's interests can only be served by close partnership with our European allies & I'm hugely looking forward to the work ahead.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

In my latest for @ArguablyMag I wrote about why Burnham should embrace the politics of anti-corruption.

[Arguably @ArguablyMag]

“Seizing the microphone for a national conversation about gold, crypto and dodgy property is the perfect way to make Farage squirm”.

@b_judah writes on the anti-corruption summit that he planned and that Burnham should champion. https://t.co/gYrZki8sZA

[Arguably @ArguablyMag]

“Seizing the microphone for a national conversation about gold, crypto and dodgy property is the perfect way to make Farage squirm”.

@b_judah writes on the anti-corruption summit that he planned and that Burnham should champion. https://t.co/gYrZki8sZA

[George Eaton @georgeeaton]

Dirty money should be Burnham’s fight – @b_judah writes for @ArguablyMag on the anti-corruption summit that he planned and that the new PM can champion. https://t.co/3mQZdTkYMe

[UnHerd @unherd]

Why we can’t outrun the Neanderthals, by Ben Judah (@b_judah)

Our world has changed enormously since behavioural modernity. We not only live in an empty world but a drowned world, one utterly reshaped by massive coastal flooding from the end of the ice age.

Yet Nunn has documented 21 Aboriginal stories which recount exact locations off coastal Australia there is no way modern inhabitants could have known about.

From vanished islands to marshes and land bridges — not least the one to Tasmania — these memories of what must have been sudden and shocking sea-level rises can be dated to between 7,500 to 12,000 years ago.

Read more below ⬇️

https://t.co/uICooItjoL

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

@MinooFramroze Thank you so much I have indeed! He’s on his third Prime Minister already!

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

In what is only appropriate, for a former Starmer-era Special Adviser after the first week of the new regime, I have written an essay about Neanderthals.

[UnHerd @unherd]

Why we can’t outrun the Neanderthals, by Ben Judah (@b_judah)

To become a father is to be plunged into a world of stories. Dragons, tigers, talking bears — some of them half-remembered, from when they were read to me — every night before bedtime. No parent needs an anthropologist to tell them there is something primordial about putting your child to sleep.

But could there be something more? Can we make out in our stories, like smudged handprints on a dark cave wall, clues to our deepest history?

For the past two years of reading board books, I’ve kept wondering: are all those giants, wild men and ogres a flicker of memory of the Neanderthals?

Read more below ⬇️

https://t.co/uICooItjoL

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

@TomTugendhat @unherd Thank you so much Tom!

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

I’ve written about this extensively. The British government has spoken about it extensively. No case has more extensively made. I just can’t be bothered wasting my Friday evening explaining it again to you because I am researching Neanderthals and prehistoric cats. (Not a joke.)

[Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin]

Always what happens when you get past the thin canonical veneer of Policy Justifications—without accepting an abstraction as an answer.

Of course no one at the Foreign Office or No. 10 can say what dire doom would befall Britain if she quit “supporting the struggle in Ukraine”

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

@curtis_yarvin I can't be bothered with this I'm afraid.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

@gideonrachman @curtis_yarvin Proust as I die — what a perfect way to go.

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

A noticeale thing about a lot of American voices, in their country's current sorry state, is they cannot pull off the true haughtiness of disdain that springs with true confidence -- which is of course not caring at all.

In the Reagan or even the Clinton era I don't think a well known contrarian intellectual would have even bothered making a joke about something as irrelevant to them as a European junior ministerial reshuffle.

But when you're insecure, even something as irrelevant to American life as Labour Party appointments is a chance to mock and belittle Europeans to fill that gigantic self-doubt so obvious to us over the Atlantic. That's why they do it all day every day on this app.

[Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin]

The idea that the UK in its present state has a foreign policy is absurd. Like you’re in hospice with terminal melanoma, but also applying to grad school in French literature

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

Hard to reply to someone shit-posting by serious-posting but unsportsman-like not to have a go! From the tangled carcass of the American intelligentsia, it might look like the way the UK is trying to stay out the Trump’s misadventure in Iran whilst quietly building alternative coalitions to reduce its dependencies from on American power and support Ukraine in its struggle from the GPAC fight jet to the Coalition of the Willing are “studying French literature on your deathbed” but in reality it’s finding new ways to cooperate with your neighbours after your old friend becomes increasingly erratic, emotional and odd.

[Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin]

Both nations remain tangled in the carcass of their bizarre 19-20C missionary empire. But extricating the UK is a hell of a lot easier.

Just stop. Turn it all off. We’ll take the bases. The only foreign policy you need: sending the foreigners home