Brexit

Friday

Robert Peston

How talks between Labour and the Tories reached breaking point

I am not sure whether it’s me or ministers who are the more naive. Because last night I was persuaded by Cabinet sources a breakthrough was nigh in talks to resolve the Brexit deadlock between the Government and Labour. But the talks are already on the verge of collapse – with each side making charges it is the other side which is negotiating in poor faith. Labour sources say the memorandum sent by the PM to Jeremy Corbyn this afternoon shows Theresa May has not shown the flexibility her colleagues expected. What has disappointed Corbyn and his Shadow Brexit Minister Keir Starmer is – they believe – the government is

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Brexit is exposing Nicola Sturgeon’s hypocrisy

Like Mother Teresa on a message grid, Nicola Sturgeon loves nothing more than going among the poor and downtrodden with a hug, some hope, and an embargoed press release. EU nationals are the latest beneficiaries of the First Minister’s ministrations. The SNP leader has penned an open letter to EU citizens resident north of the border as part of her ‘Stay in Scotland’ scheme to help them secure settled status. The language is as meticulously neutral as it always is in taxpayer-funded Scottish Government initiatives: ‘As EU citizens in the UK you have had to endure years of careless indecision on what the future holds for your lives, your careers and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May’s Brexit talks with Corbyn run into trouble

Talks between Labour and the government over Brexit aren’t going anywhere. Labour has released a statement this evening saying that: “We are disappointed that the government has not offered real change or compromise.” The Guardian’s well informed Heather Stewart is reporting that Labour are saying that the government weren’t offering any changes to the political declaration, but just a memorandum to sit alongside the deal. This is, obviously, not enough for Labour. The impasses in these talks is not that surprising. Both sides know that a deal risks splitting their own party and the prospects of two parties being prepared to take that risk simultaneously was fairly low. The question

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 4 April 2019

German customs The original customs union, or Zollverein, was established by Prussia along with 17 other states which make up modern Germany in 1834. Prior to that, traders crossing what is now Germany, were obliged to make multiple declarations and pay taxes as they moved across state borders. — It had taken 15 years to establish, but achieved a big step towards realisation in 1828 when Prussia formed a union with neighbouring state Hesse-Darmstadt, Bavaria formed its own union with Wurttemberg, and Saxony with Thuringian. — Not everyone was convinced. Hamburg and Bremen, which conducted much external trade by sea and made a lot of money from import duties, were not

Peter Jones

The comedy and the crisis

Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime ends), who better than the comic playwright Aristophanes to show us how, despite our feckless MPs, we can leave the EU? In 425 bc Athens had for six years been locked in a grinding war against Sparta. Because Pericles had persuaded the assembly not to take on Sparta by land, the people of Attica (Athens’s territory) had abandoned their farms and crops to the enemy and withdrawn inside Athens’s long walls, where a dreadful plague had killed about a quarter of them (including Pericles). In the comic festival of that

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 April 2019

There is a logic in Mrs May’s late move to Labour. It is the same logic by which both parties, at the last general election, put forward very similar policies about Brexit. They need to stay together (while feigning disagreement for party reasons) to frustrate what people voted for. Just as they both said in 2017 that they wanted to leave the customs union, now both are working to stay in it. It is the same logic by which Mr Speaker Bercow has arranged for Sir Oliver Letwin to become prime minister on roughly alternate days. None of the main players really wants Brexit, but none can really say so.

The Spectator

Letters | 4 April 2019

About the Bible Sir: I was confirmed by Richard Holloway as a schoolboy at Fettes College, and then taught by John Barton while an Anglican ordinand at Oxford University. So I was intrigued to read Holloway’s review of Barton’s latest book, A History of the Bible (30 March), and disturbed by their conclusions. Indeed, both the book and the review go a long way to explaining why the median size of a Church of England congregation is 28, and why numbers are at an all-time low. One doesn’t have to be an anti-intellectual fundamentalist to believe in orthodox biblical Christianity, or to realise that being a disciple of Christ means

Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 April 2019

After all that waiting and arguing, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed leaving the EU. The builder boyfriend and I celebrated by popping the cork on a bottle of Denbies bubbly and flying his old yacht’s backstay union flag in the dining room window, which saves me buying curtains. The builder b drank the Dorking bubbly. I’m teetotal so I stick to fizzy water. I don’t anticipate any problems getting Perrier or San Pellegrino in the coming months but there’s always Highland Spring. Of course, if Scotland gets antsy and imposes a blockade, I will have to invest in a carbonation machine. It’s a small price to pay for freedom.

The Spectator

Where Brexit failed

One of the many tragedies of Theresa May’s premiership is that, having come up with a coherent policy on how to enact Brexit, she spent her prime ministerial career failing to follow it.  The words she used in her speech at Lancaster House in 2017 seemed clear enough: ‘No deal is better than a bad deal.’ It made sense to repeat this in the last Tory manifesto. She was to seek a free trade deal with the EU, but if that proved impossible, then Britain would be leaving anyway. In the event, the EU has not merely failed to offer a good deal, it has refused to offer any trade

Piers Morgan

Diary – 4 April 2019

I voted Remain, and still don’t think Brexit is a good idea. However, if there were to be a second EU referendum, I would vote Leave. Not because I’ve experienced some Damascene conversion to the Brexit cause — I haven’t met anyone who has changed their mind about it and suspect these people don’t exist outside Alastair Campbell’s hysterical Remoaner mind — but because I would be so furious at a second referendum happening at all. What’s going on now is a disgrace: a House of Commons packed with Remainer MPs trying everything in its power to reverse the 2016 result or dilute Brexit so much that it ceases to

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why a leaky Commons and a Brexit crisis are symptoms of the same problem

Oh look, there’s water coming through the roof of the House of Commons! What a gift to those starved of metaphors for the mess that has been made of Brexit. The problem is that the water coming through the roof, which the House authorities are insisting is not a sewage leak (in a blow to fans of particularly crap metaphors), is far more than some kind of coincidental symbol of what’s going on. It’s actually just a different manifestation of the same problem afflicting British politics as the one that’s led us into the Brexit crisis. The House of Commons Chamber is the bit of Parliament that the public notice

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn has ditched his principles over Brexit

Remember when people would say things like, ‘Jeremy Corbyn might talk a lot of nonsense but at least he has principles’? We now know what rot that was. Corbyn is, in my view, the most unprincipled politician in the UK right now, and by some margin. Exhibit A: this man who was a devoted Eurosceptic his entire life has now effectively been employed by the establishment to keep us tied to the EU. This man who raged against the Brussels machine for years is now tasked with softening Brexit to such a degree that Britain will remain tied to the Brussels machine. For a taste of power, for a taste

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Philip Hammond has ignited Tory tensions over Brexit

The magnitude of the gulf between the cabinet and perhaps a majority of Tory MPs over how to deliver Brexit was on display like an oozing wound on my show last night. The Chancellor was his normal phlegmatic, unsugaring self when revealing the government is reconciled to a long Brexit delay till at least the end of the year – and that the best the prime minister can hope for from the emergency EU council on Wednesday is that the EU’s 27 leaders would allow her a break clause, so that if a Brexit deal is fully approved on all sides earlier, the UK could leave the EU at that earlier

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The losing game

Iraq, the financial crisis, the expenses scandal — all of these undermined trust in politicians. They created an impression of a governing class that was devious, inept and venal. But the damage they did to public faith in politics is nothing compared with the damage that will be done by a failure to deliver Brexit. Brexit is the result not just of a referendum but of two general elections. The Tories would not have won a majority in 2015 without their pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. In 2017, Labour wouldn’t have been able to deny the Tories a majority if they had not been committed to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What the hell is a Progressive Conservative?

Who is your favourite brave Remainer Conservative MP? Anna Soubry has to be near the top of the list, for having remarked before the referendum: ‘We are trusting the British people. We will go to the people, and let the people decide whether or not to stay within the EU.’ And then at about lunchtime on 24 June 2016 bravely insisting that we should take not the slightest bit of notice of what the British people had decided. Or what about that brave no no-deal triumvirate of the early Victorian funeral directors ‘Hammond, Grieve and Gauke, for Exceptional Service in the Sad Event of Your Passing’, sunlight palely glinting on

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

We’re in danger of missing out on the next industrial revolution

Business investment in the UK declined in all four quarters of 2018 to complete a year-on-year dive of 2.4 per cent, according to the ONS. These are the worst capital spending figures since the 2008 crisis, and you’ll guess where the Bank of England places the blame: weaker global growth hasn’t helped but the ‘UK-specific factor’ is ‘a growing portion of [companies] putting new capital investment on hold until there is greater clarity around Brexit’. Amid reports that factories are focused on stockpiling components ‘at the fastest rate on record’, no one expects investment for the first half of 2019 to look stronger. Jürgen Maier, who runs the UK factories of

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Pitching at the centre will do the Tories no good

Gosh, it’s depressing watching the natural party of government committing slow-motion suicide. It’s depressing even if you’re not, as I am, an instinctive and more or less lifelong Conservative. What it means is that Britain is on the verge of losing its most effective, tried-and-tested prophylactic against the misery of socialism. Sure, there are lots of other parties competing to perform this function: Ukip; the Brexit party; the SDP; For Britain. But will any of them be able to do enough to avert the dread possibility of a regime led by Jeremy Corbyn? Let me first explain why I know that the Conservatives are doomed. It’s not so much to

Richard Bratby

Splitting headache | 4 April 2019

Back when the UK was assumed to be leaving the European Union on 29 March, the Aurora Orchestra was invited to Brussels to participate in Klarafestival: specifically, an evening of words and music ‘celebrating cultural links between Europe and the UK’. And because arts organisations in general (and orchestras in particular) change direction with the agility of a supertanker in pack ice, it went ahead regardless. The cellist Nicolas Altstaedt played John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil with exquisite purity of tone. Ian Bostridge sang Britten’s Les illuminations: brisk, earthy, vividly theatrical. The Aurora Orchestra’s strings, playing standing up, flashed and bristled back at him. Musicians like to talk about the

Robert Hardman

Bonne chance, Ireland

Seventy years ago this month, a prime minister led a divided nation towards the exit from what was then one of the world’s most important organisations. On that occasion, Ireland was the country wanting to leave and there was no backstop to hold things up. Despite the pleas of the other member states, the Irish walked out of the Commonwealth. I was reminded of that moment this week as the budding bromance between the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and France’s President Emmanuel Macron unfolded. Relations have never been better, Mr Varadkar cooed to nods from M. Macron. As well he might. For Varadkar has just returned his nation to the

Wednesday

James Forsyth

One vote in it as Yvette Cooper’s bill passes

Yvette Cooper’s bill, requiring the Prime Minister to seek an Article 50 extension to avoid no deal, has passed by 1 vote—going through all its Common stages in a single evening.  The passage of this bill at such speed even though Theresa May has said she’ll ask for an extension, is another demonstration of how committed the anti no-deal majority in parliament is. But before these anti no-deal MPs pat themselves on the back, they should realise the limits to their action. Parliament is sovereign, but it isn’t sovereign over the EU27; and it is they who’ll decide whether to grant the UK an extension to the Article 50 process.