Let me lay out my cards on the table: I am clueless about Irish political history. I was born in the early 1980s in Wales. My childhood was spent in England and Wales. In did not learn about Irish politics or history at school. In my politics degree in the […]
Tag: Soft Brexit
Varieties of Brexit
Various varieties of Brexit crop up in the British media, but it has all started to get a bit unmanageable. So here, as a sort of summary, are twenty varieties of Brexit! Soft Brexit One of the two original varieties of Brexit, Soft Brexit means the UK would leave the EU […]
For the rest of the EU, it’s as if a Soft Brexit has already happened
The amusing film of Theresa May at last week’s European Council looking rather confused and isolated drew the predictable reactions – Brexiteers saw it as the EU bullying the UK, while Remain people saw it as a symbol of Britain’s choice to isolate itself. For me the thing that was […]
Whatever Brexit you want, make the case for it. Don’t dream up justifications from prior to 23rd June that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
What sort of Brexit did the British actually want? That’s actually a damned hard question to answer – because before 23rd June we did not have a concrete Brexit plan that the Brits were voting on. The Leave campaign remained vague and presented no single Brexit variant. The question on the […]
The hard vs. soft Brexit framing will do just fine
Owen Jones has a piece in The Guardian about the language of Brexit. We should not use the term “Hard Brexit”, he argues, because actually what a “Hard Brexit” means is a “Chaotic Brexit”. Jones is right to talk about the vocabulary, and he is right that framing matters, and […]