So there has been no progress on Brexit at the European Council that started last night and is carrying on today, and there will be no extra summit about Brexit mid-November either until Michel Barnier reports “decisive progress” in talks. I’d hoped it would not be so, and that a […]
A week from now leaders of the European Union’s 27+1 Member States will have sore heads after a long night. Friday 19th October will be the second day of the European Council at which the fate of the Brexit negotiations is to be decided. However hard it is, decide something […]
It’s early September 2018. Officially Brexit – 29 March 2019 – is now just 199 days away. Lest we forget, the Withdrawal Agreement that is due to be agreed is supposed to deal with three issues – citizens rights, budgetary contributions, and the Irish border. There is something like an […]
Over the past week a fair few people have tweeted that it’s time for those on both sides of the Brexit debate to do more to respect the other side. Most of these comments come from the make-the-best-of-Brexit sort of people, many of them formerly soft Remain people who think […]
It’s pretty seldom I agree with Larry Elliott in The Guardian, but the headline of his recent piece – “Britons seem relatively relaxed in the face of Brexit apocalypse” – struck me as about right. Because there is not going to be a Brexit apocalypse. Or at least not in […]
Channel 4 interviewed Jeremy Corbyn about Brexit. Apparently they were only allowed to ask him one question, so they asked the same question six times. “Do you honestly believe that Britain is better off outside of the EU?” He cannot answer. Have a watch. "Do you honestly believe that Britain […]
It took the UK government over 2 years from the EU referendum and a full 15 months from the start of the Article 50 period to decide its Brexit position – what became known as the Chequers Deal. But then Boris Johnson and David Davis promptly resigned within days, undermining […]
The latest European Council has come and gone. No progress was made on Brexit. Indeed no progress has been made for months – at least since February. Tusk and May repeated the tired soundbites that progress had indeed been made, but no-one believed it. Meanwhile news emerged that Davis has […]
Ladies and gentlemen, Stories of my imminent departure from government have been filling newspaper column inches for the past few days. I am here today to confirm to you that this is indeed true. I am resigning from Theresa May’s government. And of course my reasons are connected to Britain’s […]
English politicians are prone to playing lip service to the unity of the United Kingdom. Theresa May even made sure she visited Northern Ireland on her whistle-stop one year until Brexit tour last week. May leads the Tory Party that is officially called the Conservative and Unionist Party. But how […]
Sometimes a tweet from a politician really hits the mark. So it was with this yesterday from European Council President Donald Tusk: I have just recommended to EU27 leaders that we welcome, in principle, the agreement on transition. In practice, the transition phase will allow to delay all the negative […]
The UK government’s Brexit strategy at the moment could be summed up as trying to do the minimum possible to get Brexit done. Avoid confronting the inevitable trade offs, wish away the negative economic consequences, and try to push all the difficult decisions forward into what the EU calls the […]