Eu politics

This is what Theresa May should say in her Florence speech

Tomorrow in Florence, Theresa May needs to make the speech of her life. Britain has a strong hand to play in these EU talks and it’s time the Prime Minister showed it. May must assert once again that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, shoring up the UK’s bargaining position. She should also insist Britain won’t confirm any ‘divorce bill’ until these Article 50 talks end in March 2019, with the final amount dependent on the goodwill the EU has shown. Above all, taking her cue from Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister needs to present an inspiring vision of the UK outside the EU. The heyday

The Catalonian independence battle is one of rising hostility

As the Catalonian independence battle continues to escalate ahead of the proposed October 1st referendum, Mariano Rajoy’s government is going all-out to thwart the secessionist efforts of Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. As he does so, it is becoming harder to see when or how this increasingly unpleasant conflict will be resolved. Following the orders of a judge on Wednesday morning, national police raided 42 premises in Barcelona – including several governmental offices – in search of referendum-related materials such as ballot papers and pro-independence pamphlets. They arrested 14 people, amongst them the Economy Secretary General Josep Maria Jové and an advertising professional whose firm is believed to be in possession

Matthew Lynn

Forget hard or soft. What we need is a quick Brexit

Should the exit bill be €20bn or €40bn? Should the trade deal be the ‘Swiss-plus’ or ‘Canada-lite’? Should our negotiating strategy be the full cliff-edge, or should we opt for the reverse gear? If we had a couple of micro-chip factories for every different version of Brexit on offer, we’d probably be worrying about it a lot less. But in fact there is something far more important than whether we end up with a hard or soft Brexit – and that is a quick Brexit. Ask anyone in business – and the debate about how to leave the EU is mostly about preserving the economy – and they will tell you

The great Brexit bus delusion

I know many Leave voters. Most of my family. Around half of my friends. Lots of the people in the immigrant community in London I grew up in. (We’re bad immigrants, being anti-EU, so we never feature in the migrant-sympathetic commentary of EU-pining hacks.) And not one of them has ever said they chose Brexit because of that £350m-for-the-NHS thing on the side of a bus. The idea that that bus swung the referendum, that it duped the voting hordes, has become one of the great, and nasty, myths of the Brexit era. The bloody bus is back in the news this week after Boris Johnson said he’d like to

Ed West

Multiculturalism is Europe’s new faith

Never mind the terrorists, chaps, London will just keep calm and carry on. We’ll put the kettle on or defy them by going out and getting pissed, because life will just continue as normal. That’s the fitting response to terrorism, and it won’t affect our lives. Except it will. It will affect your life when you’re queuing endlessly to be searched by security in every public building. When you pass by bollards and barriers put in place to stop mass vehicular homicide. The nervousness you’ll feel whenever you’re on the Tube or when your child gets on public transport in the morning. As the attacks increase, you’ll hear more and

Ryanair’s chaos prediction is coming true – but Brexit isn’t to blame

So, the worst has happened, just as Ryanair said it would. The budget airline has had to cancel thousands of flights – around 50 of them, every day, for the next six weeks. It follows an ominous warning that was made by chief executive Michael O’ Leary last month: “What is increasingly likely to happen is that there will be no flights. Mrs May and the Brexiteers will be trying to explain that to you in 12 months’ time, why getting a car to Scotland or a ferry to Ireland are the only options on offer.” Except, that is, while last month’s warning concerned Brexit, this week’s cancellations concerned a cock-up

James Forsyth

The biggest Cabinet Brexit split

The Cabinet remains divided on one of the most fundamental Brexit questions. Everyone in the Cabinet does accept that Britain is leaving not just the EU but the single market too. But there remains a split over whether Britain should be aiming for an EEA minus deal with the EU or a CETA plus one. This might sound techy but it is fundamental to Britain’s future. Free movement makes it a political non-starter for Britain to stay in the single market. However, several of the most senior members of the Cabinet, backed by the institutional Treasury, think that Britain should stay as closely aligned to the single market as possible.

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Boris’s ‘naked pitch’ for the top job

Has Boris Johnson launched a military coup? Based on ‘some of the chatter coming out of the Westminster Bubble’, you’d be forgiven for thinking his Brexit intervention was just that, says the Sun. It’s time for everybody to ‘calm down’, the paper urges. Yes, some of those who have questioned the timing of the article – published in the run-up to Theresa May’s major speech on Brexit this Friday – may have a point. But Boris is nonetheless ‘entitled to a view on what Britain might look like after we leave the EU’. The Tories need to quit the fighting amongst themselves and realise that the only ones to benefit from

Brexit poses fresh problems for Welsh devolution

Twenty years ago Wales (barely) said Yes to devolution. Despite a Welsh Assembly being supported by the wildly popular new Prime Minister Blair and opposed by the very unpopular Conservatives, the public gave the most grudging endorsement to partial self-rule. A lot of water has flowed under many Welsh bridges since then. Public opposition to devolution fell away surprisingly quickly after 1997; the latest evidence, which I will be presenting in Cardiff on Monday, confirms that a clear majority in Wales now support devolution. There is little political opposition either. The Conservatives swiftly accepted the referendum result; since returning to power at Westminster they have overseen two Wales Acts transferring

Steerpike

Why is the UK’s supposedly impartial statistics watchdog joining the Boris-bashing?

Okay, it’s a rainy Sunday, but surely the new chief of the UK Statistics Authority has better things to do than send angry tweets to the Foreign Secretary? Alas not. Today Sir David Norgrove, the newish chairman of the UK Statistics Agency, tweeted out a letter declaring himself ‘surprised and disappointed’ that BoJo has ‘chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union’. He says that this ‘confuses gross and net contributions…. It is a clear misuse of official statistics’. Sir David Norgrove writes to Foreign Secretary about use of

Sunday shows round-up: Amber Rudd says Boris is ‘back-seat driving’ over Brexit

Amber Rudd – Boris should not ‘back-seat drive’ over Brexit The Home Secretary took to Andrew Marr’s sofa in the wake of the Friday’s failed terrorist attack on a London Underground train at Parson’s Green station. However, the topic swiftly turned from security to Boris Johnson’s latest 4,000 word essay published in the Telegraph on Saturday. The Foreign Secretary laid out his vision for Brexit – days before the Prime Minister is due to make a crucial speech in Florence. Rudd defended Boris’ intervention, but made clear that she did not want the Foreign Secretary to be in charge of the UK’s negotiations: AM: Do you think that this article

Banksy’s Brexit mural has helped halt Dover’s decline

When people come to Dover, it’s usually to pass through. The magnificent castle on the cliffs may be a tourist attraction in its own right, but for the most part, Dover has been a place people go through on their way to or back from the Continent. It’s never been much of a seaside destination. The rise of cheap flights, the end of duty-free and the advent of the Channel Tunnel diminished its status as a port, and the 2008 crash hit it hard. The number of vagrants, street drinkers and empty shop premises in the centre bear witness to a town that has seen better times. Yet things are

Boris’s nasty politics would hurt the Tories and Britain

I used to have a lot of time for Boris Johnson. Sometimes whole days, in fact: from 8am until 8pm, I’d ring and text and email him, politely urging him to tell me what he planned to write his exquisitely expensive Telegraph column about, and when he’d deign to send it to me. It was, as others who’ve had the joy of calling him a colleague can attest, maddening. But he always filed, in the end. I don’t claim that working acquaintance with Boris gives me any unique insight into his soul. In fact, familiarity only makes his real character more obscure. My overall impression of a man famous for being talkative

Fraser Nelson

Finally, Boris Johnson has overcome his stage fright. Let’s hear more from him

In my Daily Telegraph column yesterday, I asked where Boris Johnson had gone. We never hear from him now, I said, unless there’s been some tragedy overseas or some risqué joke backfiring in Bratislava. Since becoming Foreign Secretary, the most gifted communicator in the Tory party had been mute – a baffling waste of talent. While he sulked, Brexit was being defined by its enemies. The narrative has become one of tedious negotiations and no one in government seemed able (or even interested) in saying what the point of Brexit was. Boris helped inspired a nation to vote for Brexit, and gave a wonderful, liberal and globally-minded definition of it

James Forsyth

Can Theresa May satisfy both Boris and the EU?

We are only six days away from Theresa May’s big Brexit speech in Florence. But it is far from certain what will be in it, as I say in The Sun today. The biggest domestic challenge for May, insiders say, is squaring Boris Johnson. I’m told that ‘there is quite a lot of nervousness about that’. ‘Boris has been the most hard-line’ of the Cabinet Brexiteers an insider tells me. One of those involved in the negotiations between the two camps predicts ‘it is going to be a tetchy week.’ Boris’s issue is money. He is opposed to paying a big exit payment to the EU and he’s told Number

Do we really want restriction on German immigration?

At my nearest library recently there was an art exhibition featuring the works of local school children on the subject of ‘unity’, with lots of drawings (many of them outstandingly good) emphasising how we’re all the same (and yet diverse) and that what we have in common is far more important than anything that divides us. We are totally, totally united. Because I’m a terrible person, there was once a time when this sort of thing would have caused me to break out in an involuntary sneer – except that this was just after the Manchester bombing and one of the schools involved was my kids’, and it just made

David Davis mocked for ‘simple and easy’ Brexit claim

The most memorable line from David Davis’s statement on the Brexit negotiations to the Commons was his claim that ‘nobody pretended this would be simple or easy’. MPs who disagree with the Brexit Secretary loved this because quite a few people have made claims to that effect, including Davis and his colleague the International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. But in terms of any revelations to MPs, the most interesting line from the minister was that the negotiations on the divorce bill could go down to the wire. ‘My expectation is that the money argument will go on for the full duration of the negotiation,’ he told the Commons. This is

I’m a Leaver who would be happy for a second referendum

To everyone’s huge surprise, Jeremy Corbyn has come out as being quite a hard-line Eurosceptic, despite his tireless campaigning last year during the referendum. He has also further cemented his party’s newfound respect for immigration restriction, attacking the importing of cheap labour from abroad. Whether any of this makes any impact on his legion of supporters, who seem to project their own vision of what he should be onto reality, I don’t know; the Labour coalition already seems so incoherent but then I’ve given up trying to understand how politics work; it’s like there’s been a writer’s strike up in heaven and nothing makes sense anymore. I suspect Corbynmania mainly comes

Young people check their privilege – and feel deeply disappointed

Who would want be a member of Generation Z? Having your every youthful screw-up tracked and recorded on social media, facing the robot job apocalypse and without a lolly’s chance in hell of ever owning a home in London – even if medical advancements allow them to work until they’re 200. To top things off, they’re saddled with years of student debt after their three years learning about Whiteness and Privilege at university. As the Guardian puts it: Students from the poorest 40% of families entering university in England for the first time this September will emerge with an average debt of around £57,000, according to a new analysis by a leading

13 things we have learnt about Britain since the EU Referendum

Happy Independence Day everyone (groan). One year on from that momentous day, here are 13 things we’ve learnt from the Brexit vote. Most people will take any argument that suits them. They will swap ideological clothing if needs be – note how many on the Left suddenly care deeply about the pound and the City, while many on the Right seem keen on huge economic risks. Most voters are ignorant. This applies to both sides, although on average Remainers are better educated. But as Dominic Cummings has pointed out, the average Remainer didn’t know that much about how the EU actually works; they just looked at Nigel Farage and knew