I don’t care what side of the EU referendum debate you were on. This isn’t about that. This is about how much the referendum matters to you or not. And – importantly – how it seems to not matter to the very people who ran it. The story of referendum...
Some of the argument about fact and fiction in the EU referendum campaign is the normal, everyday political stuff trying to bend the facts to suit your purposes. The £350 million a day sent to Brussels claim by the Leave side is in this category – ultimately wrong, but based...
Bernd Hüttemann earlier pointed out to me that the mood section of the Facebook app for iOS has a mood “in favour of leaving the EU” but none in favour of remain. I scarcely believed it! But now I have checked and it is true. I am using an iPhone...
The deadline to add people to the electoral register has passed. The campaign is entering its final straight. Those of us caught up with the debate about the referendum see an end in sight after months of spending dozens of hours thinking and writing about nothing else. But up to...
When Matt Hanley, Josh Posaner and I started to wonder about what the Brits in Berlin thought about Brexit we could not have quite imagined how much interest there would be in this issue. We’ve managed to build a super network of people, organised half a dozen events, built a...
“Social media is overhyped” a friend said to me in a social setting yesterday. “Look at the Arab Spring – it failed!” I agree with the latter part – what happened at Tahrir Square (and how people came to the square), and indeed Gezi Park, would seem to indicate the...
Holding a British passport, and at the same time being committed to EU integration and the democratisation of the European Union, has never been easy. The months since the UK general election, David Cameron’s EU ‘deal’, and the subsequent referendum campaign, have been harder still. The Leave and the Remain...
First it was #BERBritsBrexit. Then #HHBritsBrexit. And now we’re organising the next in the series of events about the impact of Brexit on Brits in Germany to Köln on 18th May. Together with local organiser Tobias Flessenkemper, we’ll be discussing: What’s likely to happen – will the UK leave? What...
I’m going to set aside my views about the rights and wrongs of Britain staying in the EU for a moment, and instead focus on the way the Remain campaign is trying to make its case. This is especially relevant today after the Dutch expressed their vague frustration towards the...
I have made the case for why progressives and federalists outside the UK ought to advocate Brexit (for the sake of the political integration of the rest of the EU), and I have also tried to examine in a bit more depth how the outcome of the vote might have...
So Jackie Ashley is angry I tell you. Angry! We need to be “brutally honest” that the “remain campaign is failing” she writes. Well, what a sodding surprise. A campaign entitled “Britain Stronger in Europe” was never going to light anyone’s fire, was it. Run by Will Straw, relying on...
Over a beer with some academic friends yesterday, conversation turned to Brexit. Boris Johnson will only become Tory party leader if Britain exits the EU was the consensus among my friends. It’ll be Osborne otherwise. I expressed my doubts yesterday, and have been pondering this more since, and have come...