Dear Violeta, Today I am writing to you from Aachen, and I am not here for the Christmas Market. I am here because I am stuck due to the immense incompetence of European railways and the lack of basic collaboration between them in the interests of passengers. This story is going […]
The bad news from the timetable change in December was that Deutsche Bahn stopped all its night trains. The good news was that Austrian Railways (ÖBB) has taken over some of the routes under the new brand name NightJet. If you want some background on this change I was quoted […]
Trying to talk to someone in the UK about Brexit? Don’t contradict the laws of Brexit! Brexit means Brexit The British are never to blame for Brexit or any of its consequences Anyone seeing any problem with Brexit is talking the country down Giving any detail about Brexit shall be ruled […]
Another day and another “that can’t possibly be true, can it?” Brexit moment. This morning I read this in The Guardian, quoting Helena Kennedy and the House of Lords work on the rights of EU citizens to stay in the UK post-Brexit. The piece contains this line: People living in […]
Ask any Brits whose formative political years were the 1990s and they can answer you this question: “When will Britain join the Euro?” The answer, of course, is: “When the five economic tests are met!” The thing was that no-one could ever remember what the five tests were (they are here […]
I am often confronted with the line of argument that because something or other may or may not happen sometime into the foggy future, opposing Brexit is hopeless now. A Twitter conversation with Rachel Heyburn and A C Grayling this morning was a case in point. Now I am always someone who wants […]
“Brave MPs” was how Guido Fawkes described the 6 Members of Parliament who represent constituencies that nominally voted Leave in the referendum, but who voted against the opposition motion* in the House of Commons this week that supported the government’s Brexit timetable and demanded a Brexit plan from the government […]
Yesterday was a significant day for those who follow the minutiae of Brexit, for those of us who try to ascertain what is actually going despite the cloud of obfuscation and media distortion. For months the answer to what Brexit means has been “Brexit means Brexit“, and when Theresa May has […]
So often the political debate about migration and integration sees the issues at the level of the society as a whole. What can city/region/country do with X thousand new people? How will those areas change? What opportunities or burdens will all of this present to that area? How will the […]
I count a pretty senior UKIP person as a friend. Yet whenever I tell that to some liberal lefty pro-EU contacts of mine they are repulsed and perplexed. They assume the person in question must be a Paul Nuttall or Roger Helmer, someone so hopelessly dim, racist or inconsistent that they cannot […]
Imagine you have just been thrown into a tank at a sewage treatment plant. It reeks like hell, you have nothing solid to grip, and you’re flailing around madly trying to grasp something firm to hold onto, but you never manage. That’s what it has felt like to try to […]
My earlier post about immigration in the UK and Labour’s response to it prompted this reply from Rob Ford at the University of Manchester: At one level this is right – my post does not propose any reform of immigration rules as part of the solution. But this then started […]