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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
So there has been no progress on Brexit at the European Council that started last night and is carrying on today, and there will be no extra summit about Brexit mid-November either until Michel Barnier reports “decisive progress” in talks. I’d hoped it would not be so, and that a […]
It’s pretty seldom I agree with Larry Elliott in The Guardian, but the headline of his recent piece – “Britons seem relatively relaxed in the face of Brexit apocalypse” – struck me as about right. Because there is not going to be a Brexit apocalypse. Or at least not in […]
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 […]
The latest European Council has come and gone. No progress was made on Brexit. Indeed no progress has been made for months – at least since February. Tusk and May repeated the tired soundbites that progress had indeed been made, but no-one believed it. Meanwhile news emerged that Davis has […]
Earlier today I Googled “No Deal Brexit”. It’s en vogue these days, what with the UK having to grow its own food and the enduring refrain that No Deal is better than a Bad Deal. The top result in Google is one from the BBC’s Chris Morris entitled “Brexit: What […]