Eu

Friday

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Nissan’s Brexit boost for Britain

Theresa May hailed Nissan’s decision to stay put in Sunderland and build its new Qashqai and X-Trail models at its plant in the north-east as a ‘vote of confidence’ in the UK. But was this just the PM drumming up the deal or is it really such good news for Britain? The Times suggests the agreement may have come at a price. The newspaper says a ‘written promise’ was made to the company that it wouldn’t lose out from Brexit. Some have said it smacks of a sweetheart deal between the Government and the carmaker – something business secretary Greg Clarke, who insisted no cheque book was waved at the

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Contours of the mind

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we are discussing cartography and the nether regions, it is wonderful to find in the British Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore knickers made out of second world war airmen’s silk escape maps. Maps certainly colonise our imaginations in many different ways. The allies in Iraq had a ‘road map’ rather than a strategy. So much of personal value can be lost in the creases and folds of our own ‘mental maps’. And couples who often travel

The Spectator

Barometer | 27 October 2016

Folio society A new collection of Shakespeare’s work credits Christopher Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays. Some other candidates claimed to have written Shakespeare plays: FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). His poems are said to share a similar structure. But lacks motive to use Shakespeare as a pen name. WILLIAM STANLEY, 6th EARL OF DERBY (1561-1642): A Jesuit spy claimed he was secretly writing plays. EDWARD DE WERE, 17th EARL OF OXFORD (1550-1604): Theatre patron said to have used pen name because an aristocrat could not take credit for public plays. Dead for the last 12 years of Shakespeare’s life. ROGER MANNERS 5th EARL OF RUTLAND. Said to have

Louise Gray

Why Brexit could be a boon for GM crops

Genetically modified crops could be grown in England following a split from the European Union. But will it be good for Britain to forge ahead with a science that many consider to be dangerous for the environment, and potentially our health? George Eustice, the agriculture minister, revealed in a written parliament answer that as part of plans for Brexit, the government was looking at the regulation of genetically modified crops.  It has come as no surprise to the farming world, which has been campaigning for years for a more relaxed approach to GM. Many in Westminster already support the planting of GM crops on a commercial scale – although the situation is different in devolved

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: May’s Brexit plan and EU leaders’ ‘rudeness’ towards Britain

Theresa May was widely praised in yesterday’s papers after the Government backed a third runway at Heathrow. And there are more plaudits for the Prime Minister in today’s editorials. The Sun says that yesterday’s figures showing the wages of the poorest rose faster than for any other section of society made it clear that it wasn’t true the Tories only care about the rich. It says the Government’s plan to reduced the balance of inequality contrasts strongly with the ‘fevered minds of Jeremy Corbyn and his deluded followers’, who try and paint Britain as ‘an unfair society plagued by gross inequality’: a picture which it says isn’t true. But The

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Despite what Big Bang destroyed, there’s still nowhere quite like the City

As the 30th anniversary of Big Bang loomed, I found myself back at the scene of my City demise. Ebbgate House — headquarters of BZW, the investment banking arm of Barclays where I worked until one fateful morning in 1992 — fell deservedly to the wrecking ball a decade ago. It was replaced by Riverbank House, and there I was last week, hovering above where my desk used to be, talking about ‘why no one listens to the City any more’ and reliving the P45 moment that released me into the happier world of journalism. Personal echoes apart, this was also a moment to revisit Big Bang, the Thatcherite reforms

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Free speech and the right not to bake a cake

Let us consider the case of the Ashers family bakery in Belfast which, in 2014, refused to make a cake. Or as some would have it, a ‘gay cake’, although that’s obviously ridiculous because all cakes are quite gay. This one, though, was requested by Gareth Lee, a local gay rights activist, who wanted it to have a picture of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street on it, under the slogan ‘SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE’, as the centrepiece of an event organised to do just that. On the basis that they were devout Christians, however, the family running this family bakery refused. And so, sore affronted, Lee sued. Really, if anybody

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The Project Fear backtracking isn’t over yet

Another day, another backtracking in the doom-laden predictions of what would happen as a result of a vote for Brexit. Back in May, World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Roberto Azevedo told the Financial Times that Britain would not simply be allowed to ‘cut and paste’ its terms of membership with the WTO. We would, he suggested, effectively have to negotiate from scratch – a process which could take years, as it did when Liberia joined. Today he has recanted, somewhat. ‘The UK is a member of the WTO today, it will continue to be a member tomorrow,’ he told Sky News. ‘There will be no discontinuity in membership. They have

Monday

Ross Clark

The EU would be mad to start a trade war with Britain. Here’s why

So far, the debate over what happens to UK-EU trade after Brexit has been conducted around a rather odd premise: that the EU will be out to punish Britain by cutting us off unless we sign up for continued membership of the single market, with free movement of people and contributions to the EU budget. Certainly, this is the impression which many EU leaders have been keen to create, and one which the ‘Remain’ lobby is more than happy to promulgate. Yet it sits rather uneasily with reality. As the Leave campaign consistently pointed out before the referendum, the EU would be mad to start a trade war because the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sturgeon’s secessionist fantasy has been rejected by Europe. So why does she ask Theresa May?

‘Downing Street says the PM is set to rebuff calls for a flexible Brexit, which would allow parts of the UK to have their own arrangement,’ said the BBC radio news this morning. Not quite. This notion has been rejected in Europe, where the idea of doing some kind of separate deal with Scotland or any constituent part of the UK was never a deal. The ‘options’ that the SNP talk about do not exist as far as the EU is concerned: it is a giant bluff. It’s far from clear why she is asking Theresa May for something that the EU has already rejected.  Even if Theresa May backed

Sunday

Fredrik Erixon

Germany, not Wallonia, is to blame for the collapse of EU-Canada trade talks

I sometimes wonder if the EU has a death wish – that europhiles like myself, when admitted to the cause, are sworn into a secret society with the ultimate goal of destroying the European Project. For a decade or more, the EU has been veering from crisis to crisis – yet presented with an opportunity to choose calm before crisis, it goes with the latter. Late on Friday, Canada’s trade minister – the former FT journalist Chrystia Freeland – declared that the trade agreement with the EU (the so-called Ceta) had failed. She’d been commuting between Brussels and Namur, the seat of Wallonia’s regional parliament, for a few days, trying

Saturday

Charles Moore

We should be flattered not threatened by France’s bid to take on the City

The French are trying to seduce the British to come and work in Paris. A video hymns the delights of La Defense, the Gallic Canary Wharf. It is a healthy Brexit effect that the French now feel that they can no longer fight the City of London solely by trying to regulate it, and must try persuasion instead. The prospect of British departure reawakens the spirit of competition in a continent which had largely replaced it with bureaucracy. By leaving, Britain ought to win first-mover advantage in this contest, but even if we don’t, we will have done a service to our neighbours which we could never have managed if

Steerpike Steerpike

Arron Banks revisits old wounds

During the EU referendum, there was a fierce contest between Vote Leave and Grassroots Out over which would win the official designation to campaign for Out. In the end, it went to Vote Leave — after it was decided that they held the widest cross-party support. Part of the issue was that the majority of eurosceptic Conservative MPs backed Vote Leave. This was down — in part — to an unhelpful interview, Grassroots Out’s Arron Banks gave to the Times. The Ukip donor struck a low note when he accused David Cameron of using his late disabled son Ivan as a prop over NHS policy. At the time, the comments were

Thursday

Peter Jones

From Socrates to Boris

In writing an article that argued both for and against the European Union, Boris Johnson was following a solidly classical precedent — that the finest exponents of the art of persuasion were those able to argue equally convincingly on both sides of any question. An anonymous document entitled Dissoi Logoi (‘Two-sided arguments’, c. 4th Century BC) provided a long list of examples: ‘Death is bad for those who die, but good for the undertakers and the grave-diggers. Farming, when it makes a handsome success of producing crops, is good for the farmers, but bad for the merchants… It is shameful for a husband to adorn himself with white lead and

Ed West Ed West

Have our thin-skinned times killed off satire for good?

Is satire dying? Zoe Williams asks in the Guardian whether the shrinking of permissible speech is killing comedy. To make her point, she wonders if the mid-1990s satire The Day Today would be tolerated in 2016 and whether ‘its surrealism belongs to another age’. The spoof news show, which in some ways seems slightly prophetic 20 years later, was sometimes edgy, and often surreal, and Williams recalls one scene in which a presenter announces in a dead pan manner that the Bank of England had issued ‘an emergency currency based on the Queen’s eggs, several thousand of which were removed from her ovaries in 1953 and held in reserve’. But, as she says: ‘If you told

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Nissan test: can we really negotiate Brexit sector by sector?

I wrote last month that a key test of Brexit success will be whether Nissan is still making cars here in ten years’ time. A few days later, Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn issued a warning that ‘If I need to make an investment in the next few months and I can’t wait until the end of Brexit, then I have to make a deal with the UK government.’ The investment decision he referred to — expected by Christmas, which means before Brexit talks even begin — is whether to build the next Qashqai model at Sunderland or in France, to avoid tariffs on exports when we leave the single market.

James Bartholomew

Carney must go

Oh dear. Mark Carney is irritated. His proud independence has been challenged. The Prime Minister had the temerity to admit that she was not altogether thrilled with his ‘super-low’ interest rates and quantitative easing. These policies meant that people with assets got richer, she pointed out. ‘People without them suffered… People with savings have found themselves poorer.’ Mr Carney found this intolerable and haughtily rebuffed her, saying, ‘The policies are done by technocrats. We are not going to take instruction on our policies from the political side.’ Back in your box, Mrs May. Carney’s in charge! As they clash, it is increasingly hard to remember what a bright day it

Sunday

James Forsyth

Will Brexit butcher the banks? | 16 October 2016

The financial crisis defines our age. It helps explain everything from the presidential nomination of Donald Trump to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party after 30 years on the political fringe. Certainly, the Brexit vote wouldn’t have happened without it. The crash of 2008 created a sense of unfairness that is still roiling our politics, as well as calling into question the competence of the West’s ruling class. The soi disant ‘experts’ were easily dismissed during the EU referendum campaign because nearly all of them had got the economic crisis so wrong. The Brexiteers asked: why should the public listen to the arguments of organisations and businesses that had

Friday

Joanna Williams

What the increase in hate crime really tells us about post-Brexit Britain

It’s official: there is 41 per cent more hatred in Britain now than there was before the vote to quit the EU. Home Office statistics out this week reveal the torrent of religious and racist fury that was unleashed on June 23rd. Only a reversal of the democratic will of the people can possibly save us now. Really? We all need to calm down. The recently invented and chillingly Orwellian concept of ‘hate crime’ tells us absolutely nothing about the state of the post-referendum, pre-Brexit nation. Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or

Constance Watson

Thank goodness ‘Marmitegate’ is over

Back in the halcyon days of EU membership, a case for ‘Remain’ was presented upon these very pages. It explored the potentially disastrous consequences of Brexit on our meals. We toyed with the threat of turning our backs on claret, kissing confit de canard goodbye, and bidding farewell to champagne after 23 June. But in my shortsightedness, and in my greed, I failed to predict that Brexit would mark the funeral march of Marmite. Which it nearly did. Despite a day of utter hysteria, unalloyed panic and bulk buying, #Marmitegate is over. Thank God. To be fair to Brexit, and all who voted for it, no one could have predicted