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 […]
Looking for new diagrams? There is a whole new series from May 2019 onwards here! Diagrams as featured by The New York Times! I have tried to make sense of Brexit through a series of flow diagrams that have evolved as Brexit decisions have been taken. This blog post gathers […]
Cowed and weakened after the events of the past few months, Theresa May will nevertheless stagger into the New Year as Prime Minister of the UK. And what she does between now and 17th (or possibly 21st) January will shape the path of Brexit – whether we like it or […]
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn might be atypical leaders of their respective parties, but in one way they are as traditional as they come: the extent to which they are partisan. Tribal. Defenders of their own parties above pretty much anything else. May emphasised her commitment to the party when […]
I am not sure this answer to a troll by Jean-Claude Piris this morning will change the guy’s mind. But “I have written a good part [of it]” when it comes to understanding the Treaty of Lisbon is a tremendous put down. That’s not all though. I am followed by […]
Even by the standards of the two and a half turbulent years since the Brexit referendum, the last 7 days have been quite something. Four major events shaped the week, and will shape what happens to Brexit now and – I think – perhaps not in the ways that many […]
In a fortnight the House of Commons will almost certainly reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal when the so-called “Meaningful Vote” happens. After that the path ahead is unclear, but one of the ways forward would be for a second Brexit referendum – a People’s Vote – to take place. If […]
So we have a Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration. A Brexit “Deal”. And at the time of writing it looks pretty unlikely that such a deal will manage to get through the “Meaningful Vote” in the House of Commons (more on that here), a second referendum (so-called “People’s Vote”) on […]
Theresa May stumbles on. Disliked by all in equal measure, she nevertheless has managed to survive through an awful election result in 2017, to get a Brexit Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration signed off in Brussels and, most recently, has seen off a poorly organised putsch by the ERG group […]
Sometime in 2000 or 2001 when I was still an undergraduate, Bogdanor and Butler had invited Jack Straw to one of their workshops about British politics at Brasenose College. Whether Labour might eventually get around to reforming the UK’s election system was all the rage back then, and Straw was […]
This was my speech at the Grüne Bundesdelegiertenkongress yesterday in Leipzig. It was enough to get me more than 200 votes for position 14 on the list, and 299 votes for position 20. But not enough to get an electable position. Why? The structures of power in the party won […]
There was a fascinating piece in the FT yesterday by Alex Barker and Arthur Beesley entitled “How the Irish border backstop became Brexit’s defining issue“. “The backstop: How a ‘meaningless’ clause now risks derailing Brexit” by Edward Malnick in The Telegraph deserves a read too. But fascinating though those pieces […]
