“He doesn’t like not being liked,” said Katie Perrior of Boris Johnson in this 2016 of the then outgoing Mayor of London in this 2016 essay by Jeremy Cliffe. Those words have stuck with me since reading that essay back then, and today it is perhaps time to revisit those […]
⚠️ This is Version 8 of this post, re-written to make it all clearer to read. For the sake of transparency the older Version 3, Version 4, Version 5 and Version 6 of the post can be found here. NOTE the major Best for Britain data update 27 November is now […]
Back a decade ago when I was building websites for politicians as a job, one of my clients wrote the following: I was born in a council house in Kendray, a district of Barnsley, on the 9th April 1955. Apart from my time at university I have always lived in […]
What makes good politics? It has been a sort of obsession of mine over the years, although I have never actually written the question in that way before. On this blog I have looked at the fortunes of the Yes Campaign in Scotland, the Brexit referendum, the Catalan independence movement. […]
At 2251 on 17.10.2017, Jeremy Cliffe tweeted this: Remotely interested in a possible new anti-Brexit party with transformative social-liberal policies? Email "I'm in" to: radicalsuk@gmail.com — Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017 At 2316 the Twitter name @RadicalsUK was secured by me, and then I messaged Jeremy. The domain name […]
Christian Allard, upon entering the Scottish Parliament after another MSP resigned in 2013, was sworn in to the Parliament in both English and French. Joanna, Polish in Scotland -"I feel like a patient on the operating table…and Scotland is holding my hand saying everything's gonna be OK" pic.twitter.com/NQUqtFd4iO — Leo […]
tldr; “…it is easier for an independent Scotland to join the EU, than for the UK to leave it…” – thanks @odtorium on Twitter. But if you do want the detail, read on! Back in 2012, prior to the Scottish Independence Referendum, I wrote a blog post entitled Answering how […]
The UK has floods once more – this time in Cumbria. 60000 homes are without power, and the region had record rainfall. That follows floods in winter 2013-2014 in the South West of England. On 14th February 2014, The Independent and a few more newspapers had stories that the UK […]
“Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal’s anti-euro Left banned from power” screamed Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph on Friday last week. The Telegraph even followed up with a piece about why Portugal’s situation was a threat to everyone else. Everyone from Daniel Hannan to Owen Jones jumped on it, and […]
I was invited to speak at DG Cambridge on 14th October about UK – German relations in the context of David Cameron’s EU referendum. Antony Carpen was kind enough to film the speech, and put it up on Youtube: There are three parts to the speech: – How did UK-EU […]
A tweet by Sony Kapoor: Any economically sensible relation with the #EU post #Brexit will be at the cost of a much greater loss of the sovereignty sceptics cherish — Sony Kapoor (@SonyKapoor) October 16, 2015 This is absolutely right, and let me give a little more context. If Britain […]
A legend persists about the 1975 referendum that confirmed the UK’s continued membership of the then European Economic Community (EEC); Britain voted to stay in an economic union back then, it is often stated, but the European Union has since become a political union. Britain didn’t vote for that. I […]
