Brexit

It’s remarkable that Arlene Foster lasted this long

Arlene Foster’s spell as leader of the Democratic Unionist party is over. Today, Foster announced that she is stepping down as party leader on 28 May, and resigning her position as First Minister by the end of June. Her resignation came after a letter, signed by three quarters of the party’s MLAs alongside some MPs, was submitted to its chair Lord Morrow calling for her departure. In what is the most dramatic case of unionist infighting since Foster herself helped destabilise David Trimble’s leadership of the Ulster Unionists in the early 2000s, moves are also afoot to remove her erstwhile deputy Nigel Dodds. Several of her most senior advisers, including the party’s chief

Vince Cable: on Brexit and the case for working with Beijing

Sir Vince Cable is talking about Brexit and damaged bicycle wheels. ‘The metaphor I like to use when talking about the economic consequences of Brexit is a slow puncture,’ the 77-year-old explains from his home in Twickenham, South West London. ‘Because effectively we’re losing access to Britain’s largest market of goods and services.’ ‘I was initially encouraged that Brexit campaigners wanted to pursue an open and global Britain,’ he says. ‘And I think that’s absolutely right because that is very much part of the old free trade tradition… But we are now in a world which is probably going in the opposite direction. And I fear that Britain now stands

Can Cummings really hurt Teflon Boris?

Seldom have so many keyboard warriors and political activists professed so much dissatisfaction towards the government of the day. For some left-wing bloggers and tweeters, the number one cause of outrage of the moment is so-called ‘Tory sleaze’, a subject to be added to an already formidably long list of gripes towards Boris Johnson that includes Brexit, the claim that Britain is not very racist and his alleged unforgivable bungling of the Covid crisis. On the right, there is now, if anything, an even wider array of issues igniting fury towards the Prime Minister. These range from the ongoing suspensions of normal civil liberties to an allegedly ‘ruinous’ green agenda; from

Alan Duncan rants about ‘idiot’ parliamentary colleagues and Britain’s waning influence

As a budding political apparatchik, my first job out of university was as a junior parliamentary assistant to Alan Duncan MP. Working for him was never taxing because it was never boring. Nicknamed ‘Hunky Dunky’, he was well known in the Tory fraternity. Too young to be a grandee and too old to be a rising star, he occupied a special space in the parliamentary party, never part of a clique yet consistently present during his 27 years in parliament. We’d often remark — to his annoyance — that he was the Chips Channon of his generation, since both often ended up on the wrong side of the winning team.

The Brexit bounce is underway

The collapse in UK-EU trade after 1 January was widely reported. What has not been reported nearly as much is that UK exports have made a near-complete recovery. They were up 46.6 per cent in February after falling by 42 per cent in January. Imports are not there yet. They were up 7.3 per cent in February after a fall of 29.7 per cent in January. The one prediction I am happy to make is that they will recover too.  What these and other numbers are telling us is that even this bit of the Brexit scare stories will not come true. If you look at the latest IMF data

Juncker’s Brexit delusion

Regrets? It turns out he has a few. The former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker does not seem too bothered by the EU’s miserable growth rate during his time in office, its geopolitical marginalisation, or indeed the growing power of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. But there is one thing that makes him at least a little sad. Not deploying the formidable force of his personality to swing the British referendum behind staying in the EU. Juncker now reckons the former PM’s judgement was a couple of bottles short of a full case In an interview this week, Juncker revealed that David Cameron told him to keep out of

If Starmer goes, can Labour’s Corbyn critics keep hold of power?

Keir Starmer is only a year into his job as Labour leader, but could his time in charge soon come to an end? Starmer is under increasing pressure following his failure to revitalise Labour. A bad set of results on 6 May could mean the final nail in the coffin. If Starmer is ousted – and that remains a big if, given the lack of viable contenders for the job – Corbyn’s critics within the Labour party will quickly find themselves in a difficult position. With no heir apparent on the Labour right, Starmer’s departure could easily mean the left taking control of Labour all over again. Yvette Cooper has

The EU needs to stop playing politics with law

The Lugano convention – part of a tapestry of complicated international law agreements ensuring the courts of one country recognise the courts of another – has a dull name but it matters a great deal. Since the EU referendum, the convention has played a small role in the great internecine conflict between Britain and Brussels. Much energy has been wasted in this series of pointless bust-ups. And now, the EU is determined to use the Lugano convention – a playing field it claims to control – to ensure Britain pays a price for Brexit, by effectively blocking us from rejoining the convention. Why does this matter? Because without the convention,

The Northern Ireland Protocol is untenable

The process that delivered us the Northern Ireland Protocol already seems to have been rewritten in official memory. It suits most parties involved to pretend the outcome was inevitable. For Brussels, it helps them defend an arrangement designed to ‘protect the peace’ which is instead corroding loyalist support for the Belfast Agreement. For those in London, it is infinitely preferable to pretend that they were honouring the UK’s ‘obligations under the Good Friday Agreement’ rather than own one of the most abject episodes of British diplomacy in recent memory. It also helps to shift the blame onto preferred targets. So Boris Johnson gets execrated for lying to unionists about his

Spectacular invective: Jonathan Meades lets rip about Boris and Brexit

The title alludes to Jonathan Meades’s first collection of criticism, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, and to the album by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their scabrous personae of Derek and Clive. Meades explains the title in his introduction: ‘It’s akin to “Two-Hour Dry Cleaners” where the operative, out of her head on perchloroethylene, tells you that’s just the name of the shop and it’ll be ready a week Tuesday.’ This does not exactly clear matters up but at least I found it funny. And there is much to find funny here. A critic or essayist who is incapable of humour should be discarded. That said, bear in mind

Mon dieu! Our French residency permits have arrived

For EU nationals living in Britain and wanting to legally remain after Brexit, a letter or an email was enough to clinch it. It would have been churlish then for France not to reciprocate by relaxing its almost hallucinatory bureaucratic requirements for the British in France, allowing them to do the same. And to the astonishment of all, it did relax them. Catriona made an initial attempt to obtain a residency permit three years ago. She went for an exploratory interview at the nearest prefecture. A long wait in a squalid, packed waiting room, followed by the vituperative rudeness of the functionary traumatised her. Never again, she said. Sod that.

Ross Clark

Britain is closing its trade gap with the EU

So it was just a blip after all. Remember those huge headlines last month revealing that exports to the EU had plunged by 41 per cent in January, leading frustrated remainers to bleat: we told you so? ‘Brexit – the unfolding disaster’ tweeted Lord Adonis for one, along with a graph showing the sharp fall in January. Now we have the figures for February, which has been reported rather less loudly, but which show just as strong a rebound. Exports in goods to the EU in February, records Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, were 56 per cent up on those in January. They are still down 11.6 per cent on February 2020, but

James Dyson isn’t a Brexit hypocrite

He backed Brexit for a wheeze – and then, when he realised that it was actually going to happen and the implications for his business sank in, he fled to Singapore. That, very simply, is the Remainer case against Sir James Dyson. But how does it stand up against reality now that Brexit has happened? In an interview with the BBC, Dyson revealed a little more about his decision, in 2019, to relocate his HQ in Singapore, and why he backed Brexit. Dyson has burned his fingers, but not in the ways which Remainers asserted No, Sir James has not left Britain. His company still employs around 4,000 people here,

What happened to the great Brexit trade chaos?

The ports would reek from the smell of rotting fish. Factories would close en masse as orders got snarled up in red tape. There would be chaos at the borders as deliveries were blocked, and services would hit a wall of ‘non-tariff barriers’ that would make it impossible for British firms to sell them across Europe.  We have heard a lot over the last few weeks about how much disruption our departure from the European Union was causing for exporters, and there were lots of stories about firms that might go out of business or would have to move production to France or Poland. Membership of the single market, despite

The UK’s vaccine roll-out has ended the Brexit debate

The country would remain implacably divided for a generation, with Remain and Leave replacing class and geography as the new fault line in British politics. International investors would take a generation to come round to the idea. And campaigns to re-join the EU would grow in strength as the chaos deepened. Even a few months ago, it was possible to argue that Britain’s tortured debate about leaving the EU would run and run without any seeming end. And yet since then something very interesting has happened. The UK’s comparative success at rolling out Covid-19 vaccines has in effect sealed the Brexit deal. The debate is now over, both here, and

Can Spain’s Europhilism last?

‘Suppose a man be carried, whilst fast asleep, into a room where there is a person he longs to see and speak with; and be there locked fast in … he awakes, and is glad to find himself in so desirable company, which he stays willingly in … I ask, is not this stay voluntary? I think nobody will doubt it: and yet, being locked fast in, it is evident … he has not freedom to be gone.’ Happy in a room he cannot leave, the man John Locke imagined during his musings on free will might almost be a metaphor for contemporary Spain in the European Union. Awakening from

The Good Friday Agreement’s uneasy anniversary

On the 23rd anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement, it’s safe to say celebrations here in Northern Ireland will be muted at best. Over the past ten days, hundreds of rioters wielding bricks, bottles, stones and petrol bombs in Belfast have injured more than 70 police officers, most notably in the west of the city, where working-class loyalists and republicans live cheek by jowl. In terrifying scenes, a bus driver narrowly escaped injury when his vehicle was petrol bombed and left to coast down a street. The trigger for the violence was the decision by Northern Ireland’s public prosecution service not to bring charges against 24 Sinn Féin

Starmer’s Labour is following the French Socialists into oblivion

Why does Keir Starmer seem set on following the example of the French Socialist party, and leading Labour into electoral oblivion? The sad truth is that it could all have been so different. Back in September 2019, at the height of the Brexit saga, it was obvious that Corbyn’s Labour was increasingly contemptuous of Britain’s white working-classes. But instead of reaching out to Red Wall voters, Starmer has doubled down on this misguided approach. The miserable state of the French left should serve as a warning to Labour that you betray your traditional voters at your peril. In the last few years, France’s Socialist party has imploded, reduced to such penury that they

What should go in the Brexit museum?

Have you ever wondered what happened to Boris Johnson’s Brexit bus? One might think such a large, controversial item would be too conspicuous to vanish into the ether, but for the life of me, I have no idea where it is. Yes, I know, red buses aren’t exactly a novelty in the UK, being the favoured mode of transport of Liverpool footballers, the loud actor fellow who was in Lewis, and most of the city of London. Perhaps it’s decided to leave its infamy behind and hide in plain sight, and is currently ferrying people from Hammersmith to Chiswick. But that particular bus shouldn’t be left to a quiet, mundane

Starmer needs to call time on his boring top team

At the start of 2021, Labour and the Tories were neck and neck in the polls. Only three months later, a YouGov poll out this week has the Conservatives ten points up on Starmer’s party. This popularity dive comes at the worst possible time for Labour, with a crucial set of local elections, mayoral contests, Scottish parliament elections and the Hartlepool by-election to consider. Starmer is powerless to control some of the forces causing Labour’s slump. But there is one big thing he could do that would help: clear out the dead wood from his shadow cabinet. Rumours about Starmer opting for a reshuffle have been so ubiquitous lately that the