Dominic Raab heads to Brussels for a chat with Barnier – but nothing is agreed regarding the backstop. A feeling of drama grips the bubble, while calm continues in the rest of the UK, and indeed, in Brussels itself. Where does “hell week” leave us then? There are only really four ways I think Brexit […]
How Theresa May’s Brexit negotiation is reaching its inevitable conclusion
There is said to be cabinet “unease” around the latest May proposal for dealing with the backstop issue the UK seemingly unwittingly signed up to in December 2017. Namely, that until a super-whizz bang trade deal between the UK and the EU can be agreed and implemented, the UK essentially stays in the Customs Union. […]
Here’s a connection between free market fundamentalism and Brexit I’d never realised before
I was having a chat with a prominent Brexiteer this week, as you do. I said to him that while I had to concede there was a Brexit that could provide for an economic boost in the abstract, in hard reality it was going to be tough precisely because business thinks that it will be […]
While it’s easy to enjoy the schadenfreude involved in the Chris Williamson deselection story, there’s something serious underneath
Chris Williamson, Labour MP for Derby North and amongst Corbyn’s biggest supporters, is one of the major cheerleaders for the mandatory re-selection of all sitting Labour MPs as well as deselection of MPs critical of the leadership. He is now apparently under threat of being deselected by his own CLP. This is most likely a […]
This feels like 2012 in some ways – only Labour are in a much worse place now
All of the analysis of conference season seems to come down to two main points. One: that Labour conference was buzzing while Tory conference was stale. Two: that Theresa May managed to clear the low bar set for her and is thus safe until the end of March next year. The first one is at […]
Last thoughts from Tory conference: Boris isn’t as popular with the grassroots as the media might have you think
The big occasion yesterday at Conservative party conference, and let’s face it, the whole conference itself, was the Boris speech. The queues for it really were impressively epic, notable even further at a conference in which the hall had mostly been half-full at best for other speeches. This has led to a media narrative that […]
Blogging to you live from Conservative party conference: more Remainery than you’d expect?
Got the train up to Birmingham yesterday morning. The journey reopened for me one of the great questions of our age: why can you get to Liverpool in two hours by train, yet it takes a little more than that to get to Birmingham which is half the distance? The first thing I went to […]
Summarising the latest Boris Johnson Telegraph article. You know, the really long one with “plan” in the title
It seems sad that BoJo’s Telegraph column is one of the few things I can bear to comment on today. Perhaps the fact that the Left now want people to boycott the Guardian because it isn’t left-wing enough is just too much for me to talk about right now, I don’t know. I suppose Boris […]
The young don’t like socialism because they are “taught to” – and that isn’t the real problem anyway
Toby Young has written an article in the Spectator about how young people get into socialism because the education system at all levels is run by socialists. This is a common trope on the right: that the system is run by people who are socialists, therefore they teach our kids to be little Marxists. On […]
Keir Starmer and his “Remain” comment: what could this mean for Labour and for Brexit?
The line was ad-libbed, apparently. “…and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option.” As anti-Brexit statements go, in the abstract at least, it is comically tame. Yet given the fact that we’ve had a couple of years of Corbyn saying things along the lines of “I hate the capitalist EU and can’t wait to […]