An email from Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove outlining her concerns about what a no deal Brexit would entail has been leaked to the media. As expected, it was a big news story yesterday. Yet given all it reveals, it is amazing how relatively little attention it received. For it shines a […]
Why I believe the Boris Johnson government is going so hard toward a no deal Brexit
I wrote an article for the Spectator yesterday about how I thought Peter Mandelson was wrong when he overplayed the likelihood that the government were going to avoid no deal by getting something nailed down between the UK and the EU before the end of the year. Instead, I posited that I thought no deal […]
Why the EU could be in for a rocky few years post-Coronavirus – and why that should make Eurosceptics on the right nervous
Since June 2016, a common trope on the right in Britain has been to big up any problems within the EU between differing member states as proof that the EU is about to crumble to pieces. This is happening now, with Leavers jumping on some Italians complaining about what they perceive as the EU’s poor […]
How long will the pretence of “real Brexit” happening on December 31st, 2020 be kept up by the government?
The government is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis at present, so one certainly cannot reasonably expect daily briefings on how the negotiations with the EU are going. For those of you who are interested, they are understandably not going at all; with the EU up to its neck in CoVid related problems as […]
In the face of the Coronavirus crisis, it would be utterly mad for Boris not to extend the transition period with the EU. Utterly mad – and here’s exactly why
We were living in strange times before the Coronavirus struck; they are now surreal beyond the imaginings of an objective viewer from five years ago. Lots of people are politicising the crisis, you know, imagining that what’s happening demonstrates the folly of austerity, or shows us what life would have been like under a Corbyn […]
This is the economic theory the Tories really seem set to test at the end of this year. To say it’s risky would be vastly understating it
The weirdest thing about the political times we live in is that the government has pledged to make a revolutionary change at the end of this year and no one is really addressing what that might mean. Part of this is Brexit burnout; part of it is that we just had a general election in […]
Here’s a big problem facing the Tories no one is talking about
It’s been mostly good news for Boris Johnson on the Labour Party front since the general election. An unnecessarily elongated leadership contest resulting in Corbyn hanging around like a very bad smell has helped dampen any scrutiny of what the government has been up to. People talk about Boris employing dead cat strategies but it […]
Why Brexit will continue to be a problem for Labour for the foreseeable future
One of the more interesting moments already in the nascent race to see who becomes the next leader of the opposition was when Jess Phillips appeared to suggest that Labour could campaign to rejoin the EU, if the conditions were right – and then, a few days later, appeared to retract this possibility. What the […]
What happens to Brexit after December 12th? There are two likely outcomes
Unless a miracle occurs and the Tories do not end up with a majority after the general election, there are two main ways that Brexit goes from there. Given this is the future of the country, it is astonishing how little this is being discussed. Except when you remember that neither of the two largest […]
Cost, complexity, fear: why it’s up to the Lib Dems to deconstruct the Tory election platform and why that is crucial
By common bubble consent, Labour have had the best start to the election campaign. The Tories seem to have not got started yet, either tactically or accidentally; the Lib Dems have been a little wobbly out of the gate, but nothing even close to the magnitude of “homosexuality is a sin”, so plenty of time […]