Imagine you have just been thrown into a tank at a sewage treatment plant. It reeks like hell, you have nothing solid to grip, and you’re flailing around madly trying to grasp something firm to hold onto, but you never manage. That’s what it has felt like to try to...
One of the most unusual post-EU Referendum stories to date has been the news that UK slaughterhouses face a possible shortage of workers. As the BVA outlines, in the meat hygiene sector some 95% of veterinary surgeons graduated overseas. Britain, it seems, does not train enough of its own veterinary staff...
[UPDATE 9.12.2016, 1515] Guy Verhofstadt has given some more detail about how important this associate citizenship thing is to him – see The Independent. However all the main issues with it I outline below still stand! There has been quite some heated reaction to Guy Verhofstadt saying he backs the...
Today – even by the standards of the speed of news about Brexit – has been an extraordinary day. Here are the five stand out issues: A leaked memo shows the UK government has no Brexit plan and estimates that 30000 civil servants are going to be needed to make Brexit...
Now, 5 months on from the EU referendum, I am growing rather tired of people over-interpreting what the referendum meant, and trying to use something that happened before 23rd June to justify what should happen now. First of all, the referendum question – it was: Should the UK remain a...
My first reaction to the Trump-Farage pictures last night was to be repulsed, not least because the group picture also shows Arron Banks and Raheem Kassam there with him – a nastier threesome in British politics would be harder to find. My second reaction was to think the opulent background,...
“So what does Brexit mean?” “It means Britain will leave the EU.” “Is that it?” “Essentially yes. The referendum asked the British people whether they wanted to Remain in the EU or Leave the EU. A majority said they wanted to Leave.” (have a look at the ballot paper here)...
I am presenting at reCampaign in Berlin today about the online communications around the Brexit vote. I do not have the time to completely and coherently write up what I will say, but here are simply some of the links to pieces I found interesting when doing my research for...
The opinion piece in The Guardian by Stephen Phillips MP has been praised by many as making a good case for the involvement of the House of Commons in the Brexit process. On that point his piece is solid, but on another issue I think he misses the point. I...
What sort of Brexit did the British actually want? That’s actually a damned hard question to answer – because before 23rd June we did not have a concrete Brexit plan that the Brits were voting on. The Leave campaign remained vague and presented no single Brexit variant. The question on the...
Owen Jones has a piece in The Guardian about the language of Brexit. We should not use the term “Hard Brexit”, he argues, because actually what a “Hard Brexit” means is a “Chaotic Brexit”. Jones is right to talk about the vocabulary, and he is right that framing matters, and...
I’ve recently been pondering what happens next in Britain’s attempt to Brexit. The summer, when Theresa May looked like she had most things in hand, is now very much behind us. But at the time of writing we are still no clearer what sort of Brexit the UK government wants,...