So Theresa May is going to make her highly awaited speech in Florence tomorrow. There has been plenty of analysis and speculation about what she is and is not going to include. Here – in a blog post I will update as more sources are available – are some of...
This morning Oliver Robbins was moved from Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) to become EU Adviser to Theresa May, based in the Cabinet Office. This afternoon it was announced that DExEU’s Director of Trade and Partnerships Antony Phillipson is departing for New York. At a...
Theresa May is due to give a big Brexit speech this coming Friday 22nd September in Florence. With Boris Johnson having jumped the gun and penned his own Brexit vision a couple of days ago (fisked by me here), and with frustration on the EU side growing about the slow...
Boris Johnson has penned a 4000 word piece about Brexit for The Telegraph (Update: now posted to Facebook as well). It’s a premium piece on their site for some reason and you have to hence register to read it – I did that, and have read it, and this blog...
29th March: Theresa May notifed the EU of the UK’s intention to leave the EU through the Article 50 procedure. Then 29th April the European Council agreed its negotiation guidelines for Michel Barnier, the chief Brexit negotiatior on the EU side. A summary of the guidelines – that committed the...
A tweet caught my eye this morning: New research reveals how big business dominates Brexit lobby meetings in London and Brussels. Taking back control? https://t.co/XSD11dlwZ2 pic.twitter.com/tW9vTgtoj2 — Global Justice Now (@GlobalJusticeUK) August 29, 2017 This is an extract from a report by Corporate Europe Observatory and Global Justice Now that...
I have been nominated to be a member of World Economic Forum’s Europe Policy Group for the period between August 2017 and January 2018. A list of the members of the group can be found here (PDF). The group contains some people I know quite well like Ulrike Guérot, Katarzyna Pisarska...
Every cloud has a silver lining, and for me personally so it has been with Brexit. In the week a year on from Brexit I toured right across Germany talking to all sorts of audiences, in English and in German, about what Brexit means, why it happened, and what we...
Germany goes to the polls on 24th September. And that means the country is in full on election mode at the moment. Posters are appearing on lamp posts, street stalls proliferating outside U-Bahn stations and supermarkets. It’s the first time I’ve actually been living in Germany for a Bundestag election...
For the past 8 years I have had the most faithful and reliable travel partner one could ever hope for. But everything has to come to an end. When I arrive in Berlin this evening, the curtain will come down on those years, the end of those hours and hours...
It started back in 2012 when Anne Laumen, Captain Europe and I decided to meet for a beer and invited other Twitter nerds along – #EUTweetUp was born. Now almost five years the ad hoc series of pub nights is still going strong. Anne has left Brussels and Captain Europe...
Regular readers of this blog know my own views about Brexit – seen from the UK side I have found the whole thing foolish from the start. But over the past few weeks I have been asking myself a different question: why is the Brexit process going quite so badly?...