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...
Every one in a while a Brussels media outlet or public affairs firm tries to show they are digital-aware by publishing a kind of league table of something to do with social media in the EU bubble. Yesterday it was Euractiv and ZN’s turn – they held an event called...
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: https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/920391741655666697 At 2316 the Twitter name @RadicalsUK was secured by me, and then I messaged Jeremy. The domain name radicalsuk.com was registered by me at 2244, and a basic WordPress powered site (even with a SSL Certificate!) was online at 0029, with...
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,...
(Note: this is not a story about BBC bias, but more how journalists can get caught up amongst the bias propagated by others) This tweet by the BBC’s political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg caught my eye the other day – retweeted more than 3000 times, so it was all over my...
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...
I’ve spent the last three days in Barcelona, observing the 1st October independence referendum, not in any sort of official capacity, but as an interested politics nerd. Political tourism if you like. After my fascinating trip to Scotland prior to the independence referendum there in 2014, it was obvious that...