Brexit transition. Often mentioned by politicians but seldom understood. In this blog entry I am going to try to make sense of it, and to try to explain why the current effort devoted to this is all probably a waste of time (at least the way the UK is approaching...
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...
A tweet I wrote earlier today drew some interesting reactions: https://twitter.com/jonworth/status/930712456447582208 It was written in light of two developments – that further information about Russian bots in the Brexit referendum has come to light, and that Theresa May’s rhetoric about Russian influence on western democracies went up a notch in...
A tweet by Alexander Clarkson caught my eye this morning: As long as Remainers reproduce an inaccurate "citizens of somewhere" with a class subtext they will simply keep playing on Brexiter terms — Alexander Clarkson (@APHClarkson) October 30, 2017 Once in a while you read something that crystallises your...
In the last 24 hours I’ve encountered a gentleman called Ian Dickinson on Twitter. He tweets with the username @iandicko73. He did not follow me, and I do not follow him. This was our first interaction: "EU citizen with a UK passport"Anyone RTing this fool will be blocked. https://t.co/IziXcf7LYz —...
Whatever Theresa May or David Davis might say (as he did this week), the UK is not going to be completely out of the EU with a negotiated agreement by 29th March 2019. Any agreement will require longer than the 18 months until March 2019 to be put into practice,...
Last week’s European Council in Brussels – as expected – did not agree that sufficient progress had been made on the three first stage Brexit issues (cititzens rights, financial settlement, Irish border) to allow the negotiations to move to the second stage. There were some friendly noises, but ultimately there...
https://twitter.com/BeardedGenius/status/921315451845660673 https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/921323572643139584 What is the answer to that? Via this Buzzfeed piece I know it is an AP image. Looking through AP’s image bank you get to this. It says it was taken by Geert Vanden Wijngaert at October 20, 2017 03:47:29 AM. As AP is New York based, I...
Earlier today I Googled “No Deal Brexit”. It’s en vogue these days, what with the UK having to grow its own food and the enduring refrain that No Deal is better than a Bad Deal. The top result in Google is one from the BBC’s Chris Morris entitled “Brexit: What...
That Theresa May is not adequately committed to Brexit is the latest one. That the EU side is too tough or too inflexible is another. That the UK civil service is full of Remain people has oddly dropped out of favour recently. That the BBC and the media are not...
NOTE: due to disk space requirements, the files mentioned in this blog post have been removed from the web. If you have any questions about these files, or this issue, please contact me. Dominic Cummings was Campaign Director of Vote Leave. His tweets from his account @odysseanproject became strangely compelling,...
When Theresa May delivered her Florence Speech a fortnight ago, my first reaction was “Is that it?” The speech had to outline something on citizens rights, the financial settlement to leave the EU, and on the Northern Ireland border, yet – especially on the last of these – it offered...