So there it is, in black and white. Вперед, к Cуверенитету comrades! Onwards, to sovereignty! Today’s FT long read (€) on how the Brexit Deal was struck and what happens next is a remarkable piece of work, drawing together a series of disparate parts of the past 12 months of the...
“When future historians try to understand how Britain ended up with a choice between chaos and becoming a satellite of the European Union, one question will stump them,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in this Irish Times column in November 2018. “Were these people telling deliberate lies or were they merely staggeringly...
It has been a good week for the SNP. On two major issues – due to their own clarity of thought and the errors of others – they have banked clear political wins. On both issues the Labour Party by contrast looks contorted and confused. First the UK-EU Deal. Here...
On page 218 and 219 of the UK-EU Trade Deal (full PDF here) is the following paragraph (emphasis is mine): In order to ensure an appropriate balance between the commitments made by the Parties in this Agreement on a more durable basis, either Party may request, no sooner than four...
An abhorrent piece appeared in The Telegraph this afternoon, wishing ill on the President of France, and trying see an upside for the British and Brexit in the comeuppance of Macron. I am not going to link to it – because that is the point. Then of course the usual happened...
The statement of the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament has been an interesting development in the Brexit saga this week. The European Parliament is trying to impose a deadline at the end of Sunday 20 December for a political agreement between the UK and the EU, although they...
I don’t know if it was the intended strategy all along (I first mused about it in November), but in these fraught December days in the Brexit end game it has become abundantly clear that the UK’s negotiation tactic has been to run the clock down to gain leverage. The...
Now confirmed! *before* Monday 7 December at 1945, European Commission President von der Leyen tweeted out the statement that a meeting between her and Boris Johnson would take place “in the coming days”. It is now 22 hours on from that statement (and it is only 570 hours until the...
OK, I might be jumping the gun – there may yet be a Deal between Britain and the EU – but as a result of this discussion with Catherine De Vries, it’s important to grasp the nettle – what terminology do we use for what comes in Brexit after 1st...
28 days to go to the end of the Brexit transition period. Things are getting edgy. The press is full of rumours of progress towards a Deal (or not). I’ve been trying to get my head around what is happening, and this post is a sort of rough sketch of...
UPDATE! New posters – to celebrate this! I have always found the GREAT Britain campaign – those posters you see at airports and railway stations – rather nauseating. It’s a bit like a product that calls itself ‘de luxe’ – it probably isn’t. To scream that you’re GREAT… well, maybe...
Nicholas Westcott wrote an interesting piece for LSE last week entitled “A peculiar definition of sovereignty is the root cause of a failed Brexit“. The whole piece is worth reading, but one part struck me as especially apt. Brexiters “definition of “sovereignty” has made failure inevitable,” Westcott writes. “It is...