Most of my energy in the past few months has been invested in explaining what I think will happen with Brexit – mostly through my series of Brexit diagrams. This has left rather little mental capacity to think about what should happen. This is a blog post to try to address that. First […]
Those of us who follow Brexit on an everyday basis have become obsessed by process. How, we ask ourselves, will the 14 day timetable imposed by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act post-Vote of No Confidence (VONC) play out with the required 5 or 6 weeks to hold a General Election, and […]
Fictitious scenario. The date is Monday 22 July, the day before Boris Johnson is expected to be approved leader of the Conservative Party, and two days before he is expected to go to the Palace to see the Queen. Jeremy Corbyn announces he will make a public speech, explaining Labour’s […]
At the Freudenstadt Symposium on European Regionalism this past weekend I was rather flummoxed by a nevertheless amusing question by someone in the audience. Are there any implausible, but still just about viable, Brexit scenarios you have not thought about? I was asked after I had presented my latest Brexit […]
One of the consistent outcomes in my latest round of Brexit Diagrams has been to foresee a General Election as the most likely outcome of the Brexit process. “But a General Election is not an outcome!” has been the common retort from my readers. “Do any of us know how […]
For years now Twitter has been my main professional social network. It is (or has been?) the way to keep in touch with what is going on in politics, and to seek to influence it in some way. I have also written a lot about it – all gathered here. […]
So May has gone. Or at least said when she will go. Her statement today that she will stand aside on 7th June, together with the announcement by Brandon Lewis and others about the timetable for the leadership election that will conclude by mid July, gives us the framework. Into […]
Just over a year ago I was speaking on a panel about Brexit at King’s College London with Richard Graham, Tory MP for Gloucester. “The democratic tradition” Graham said in sickly smooth tone 23 minutes in, “is much deeper in the UK than anywhere else in the European Union.” He […]
So with less than a month to go until Brexit (or it being delayed or cancelled), I am setting off around Europe, talking to different groups about the UK’s exit from the EU, and what we can expect between now and 29.3.2019. Details of all the events are below and […]
42 days to go to Brexit. Just over 1000 hours. And we still do not know what is going to happen in the Brexit saga. Yet as the clock ticks, some things become clearer. My Brexit diagrams have fewer branches. There are fewer possible outcomes. An early general election (or […]
The House of Commons adopted two Amendments to its Brexit motion on Tuesday this week – the Brady Amendment to replace the Northern Ireland Backstop with “alternative arrangements”, and the Spelman/Dromey Amendment against a No Deal Brexit but lacking a mechanism to achieve that. The Cooper/Boles Amendment that would have […]
Back in December I wrote that trying to break UK party politics was not the way out of Britain’s Brexit conundrum. The events of this past 7 days underline this even more. Back in December, 117 Tory MPs voted to No Confidence May as Tory leader. 118 voted against her […]