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 […]
Tag: Article 50
Brexit – what we know now, and how to still stop it
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 European Parliament election and Brexit delay – not a major headache
Brexit negotiations are heading towards their hardest phase. With less than 6 months to go, with no solution to the Irish Border problem in sight, and with Theresa May in a precarious position within her own party, the chances of actually getting a Withdrawal Agreement that is acceptable to both […]
The political crisis route to Remain
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 […]
Lemons and landing rights – the UK’s relations with the rest of the world, post-Brexit, is the issue that cannot be kicked into the transition period
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 […]
We now know where May wants to go with Brexit. We still do not know how to even begin to get there. Or if the road to Brexit is remotely worthwhile.
As anyone who has ever read this blog, or follows me on Twitter, knows, I am no fan of Theresa May or her government’s position on Brexit. So it was then not without a little surprise that I did not find myself shouting at the screen while listening to the […]
A transition period with the UK out of the EU is too complicated to agree – so extending Article 50 needs to be debated
Brexit transition. Often mentioned by politicians but seldom understood. In this blog entry I am going to try to make sense of it, and to try to explain why the current effort devoted to this is all probably a waste of time (at least the way the UK is approaching […]
Brexit: something has got to give. But what? And when?
Last week’s European Council in Brussels – as expected – did not agree that sufficient progress had been made on the three first stage Brexit issues (cititzens rights, financial settlement, Irish border) to allow the negotiations to move to the second stage. There were some friendly noises, but ultimately there […]
Brexit. Getting it all wrong.
Regular readers of this blog know my own views about Brexit – seen from the UK side I have found the whole thing foolish from the start. But over the past few weeks I have been asking myself a different question: why is the Brexit process going quite so badly? […]
The EU is preparing for the UK to leave. Really. Somehow the UK side still fails to see this.
In the period immediately after the Brexit referendum I often heard the line from pro-Brexit people in the UK that it would only be a matter of time before the EU would be begging the UK to somehow stay in the European Union, or at the very least that the […]
No, Wolfgang Münchau, even now it is not inevitable the UK will leave the EU. And if it does it will not rejoin.
I know it is Wolfgang Münchau’s job to be some sort of agent provocateur in the FT, and today he is true to form – arguing that it is now inevitable that the UK leaves the European Union, and that people who argued for Remain ought to now plan for […]
Feeling rather calm about the Article 50 notification
“How do you feel after Brexit day?” a friend messaged me on Wednesday night. “You’ve closed that chapter already, haven’t you?” “I’m fine” was my response. The friend that sent me the message was right – I have closed that chapter. While the Article 50 notification was a significant and somehow […]