The statement of the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament has been an interesting development in the Brexit saga this week. The European Parliament is trying to impose a deadline at the end of Sunday 20 December for a political agreement between the UK and the EU, although they […]
I don’t know if it was the intended strategy all along (I first mused about it in November), but in these fraught December days in the Brexit end game it has become abundantly clear that the UK’s negotiation tactic has been to run the clock down to gain leverage. The […]
Now confirmed! *before* Monday 7 December at 1945, European Commission President von der Leyen tweeted out the statement that a meeting between her and Boris Johnson would take place “in the coming days”. It is now 22 hours on from that statement (and it is only 570 hours until the […]
OK, I might be jumping the gun – there may yet be a Deal between Britain and the EU – but as a result of this discussion with Catherine De Vries, it’s important to grasp the nettle – what terminology do we use for what comes in Brexit after 1st […]
28 days to go to the end of the Brexit transition period. Things are getting edgy. The press is full of rumours of progress towards a Deal (or not). I’ve been trying to get my head around what is happening, and this post is a sort of rough sketch of […]
Nicholas Westcott wrote an interesting piece for LSE last week entitled “A peculiar definition of sovereignty is the root cause of a failed Brexit“. The whole piece is worth reading, but one part struck me as especially apt. Brexiters “definition of “sovereignty” has made failure inevitable,” Westcott writes. “It is […]
As one of my sarcastic Twitter followers put it, are these Brexit negotiations sponsored by Microsoft Windows Autoupdate as they’ve been stuck on 95% for so long? Deadlines come and go. Even the supposedly firm one, EU side, at the European Council video call last Thursday, was not respected. As […]
There is scarcely a twist or turn in the Brexit story over the past 18 months I have not charted in my Brexit diagrams. The rationale is the same now as it was when I started: to work out what is really important for the next steps of Brexit, and […]
On 8 September Brandon Lewis uttered the now famous words: that the UK Government’s Internal Market Bill would “break international law in a very specific and limited way”. That set in train a series of events that even now, two months later, have framed the discussion about that Bill as […]
For the past week I have had an awful sense of déjà vu. Shenanigans in the House of Commons about Brexit. Rumours about removal of the whip from Tory MPs should they rebel on votes. And the threat of No Deal. It feels like the autumn of 2019 all over […]
This week something interesting happened in matters Brexit: farmers at the National Farmers’ Union conference booed environment minister George Eustice (FT story here (€)). This was connected to the news that direct payments to farmers will be reduced by 25% from 1 January 2021, as Farmers Weekly reports here. Why […]
tl:dr; Opposition parties want to call an election as soon as possible, but want that election to happen as late as possible. An unconventional route – via a Vote of No Confidence tabled next week (9th September) – offers a route to this. First of all: this is not my […]