Eu

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 October 2016

Against all odds, I almost got through an entire Brexit dinner with dignity, and without opening the valve in my head which allows hot steam to escape. Almost. Our little Leave Means Leave campaign soiree at a restaurant in Birmingham was going swimmingly until a TV journalist drew up a chair and within seconds started berating one of the guests, a government minister, for not giving a cast iron assurance now that every foreigner living in Britain can stay once we leave the EU. ‘Oh go on! Can’t you just let everyone stay?’ he pleaded with the minister, who was trying to eat his sea bass. ‘I mean, these are

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Tesco finally meets its match

Only in the bizarre, upside-down, post-Brexit referendum world could Tesco try to portray itself as a victim of bullying by one of its suppliers. Isn’t Tesco supposed to be the nasty corporation which ruthlessly uses its might to squash the people who produce the goods which line its shelves? What about all those farmers, dairies and small-time cookie-makers apparently given a tough time by hard-nosed buyers at Tesco, who always want everything cheaper and for payment terms to be stretched out ever longer? I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for Tesco – I’m certainly not sobbing over my Marmite sandwiches – but the reality is that yes, the supermarket

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The battle for Brexit moves to the High Court

More than 17 million people voted for Brexit. Yet for some, that mandate isn’t quite enough. Today, the High Court is hearing a legal challenge on whether the Government should be allowed to pull the Article 50 trigger without the direct say-so of Parliament. The Commons might have spent hours debating Brexit over the last few days but for Gina Miller – the fund manager bringing the High Court case – only another vote will do. Here’s what she said on the Today show explaining her argument: ‘It’s actually very simple, our case is that this is a fundamental constitutional case saying that parliament and parliament alone can take away

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Brexit butcher the banks?

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

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

May’s head on the block

Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away with it, and you will see it is reconstituting the oldest and dirtiest alliance in Tory-history: the alliance between snobs and mobs. I accept it takes a while to see our new rulers for what they are. Theresa May represents the dormitory town of Maidenhead. Although Eton College is just a few miles down the Thames valley, she could not be further socially and intellectually from David Cameron’s public school chumocracy. As for inciting mobs, what more ridiculous charge could I level against her? May seems to have no need

Nicholas Farrell Nicholas Farrell

The road to the Jungle

 Calais On Sunday evening a British motorist, Abraham Reichman, 35, from Stamford Hill, north London, hit two Eritrean migrants who were trying to block the A16 outside Calais. They had leapt in front of his car, he says, as he slowed down to avoid dozens of migrants on the motorway. Terrified, Mr Reichman drove off at speed to the police station, where he later found out that one of the Eritreans had died. The police released him after several hours but he is under investigation for homicide involontaire. It is not difficult to meet migrants so determined to get to the land of milk and honey on the British side

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Labour asks the Government 170 questions about Brexit. But has no answer on migration

Labour wants to ask the Government 170 questions about its plan for Brexit. Yet when it comes to answering questions themselves, it seems the party is much less willing to give an answer. Emily Thornberry, in her new guise as shadow foreign secretary, was quizzed on how Labour would handle migration from the EU after Brexit on the Today show just now. And in typical fashion, she did her best to dodge the question. Here’s what she said: ‘Our position is that we need to be open to the idea of reasonably managed migration. And we need to have it as part of a larger negotiation but we are open to

Tuesday

Sarah Muir

Is Germany becoming the new sick man of Europe?

It’s not going well for Germany at the moment. Their largest bank is on the verge of collapse while their second largest bank is laying-off staff. And Frau Merkel is having to cope with the political fallout of her open-door immigration policy – not least a rise in populist nationalism and a dip in her own popularity. Germans have also been told in recent months to stockpile food, while a leaked document suggested a return to national service, which stopped in 2011, was being considered. But that’s not all: the country’s economy recently slipped in the World Economic Forum’s competitive ranking. All this makes for a grim picture. So having lived for 14 years

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Norway never said ‘nei’ to Liam Fox

Being half-Norwegian, I can rarely find anyone in Westminster to discuss the Norwegian papers with. But Monday’s front page of the Norwegian business paper Dagens Naeringsliv has been the talk of the town. Why, because its main headline trumpeted Norway said no’ (in Norwegian, of course). The other lines clarified the story – ‘Brits wanted to collaborate on a new EU deal’, but Norway said no… ‘They didn’t get Norwegian help on Brexit’. What a dream story for those who are still in mourning over June’s referendum. It was quickly picked up by the Guardian, among others.   As the article had it, Liam Fox had been keen to establish a task

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Treasury’s ‘Hard Brexit’ warning shows Project Fear isn’t over yet

Can someone please tell HM Treasury that the referendum is over? During that campaign, it made history by producing a claim that Brexit would make people £4,300 worse off per household. It was nonsense, debunked here at the time. It was not just a porkie, but a historic porkie: polls showed just 17 per cent believed this figure, around the same number that think Elvis is still alive. Even Sir Will Straw, head of the Remain campaign, admitted later that his case was actually damaged by this ridiculous campaign. The Treasury ought to be holding an inquiry into how such a wilfully misleading figure was eve produced by the civil service,

Monday

James Forsyth

David Davis, parliamentary poacher turned executive gamekeeper

David Davis batted away demands for parliament to be given a vote on the timing of Article 50 or the government’s negotiating stance. Whenever his opponents—who included Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg—brought up how Davis himself had previously said there should be a white paper on the government’s negotiating stance, Davis side-stepped the issue. He also claimed that his views on how the executive should be accountable to parliament hadn’t changed, but that there was a difference between scrutiny and micro-managing. What the government wanted out of the Brexit talks, said Davis, was control of the UK’s borders and laws, co-operation on justice and security matters that is at least

Sean Thomas

Why Brexit is just like having a baby

Since that moment in the early hours of June 24 when David Dimbleby said ‘The answer is: we’re out’, Brexit has been compared to many things. The Reformation. The Corn Laws. Weimar’s collapse into Nazism. Prohibition. The French, Russian and American Revolutions. But I think I’ve got a better comparison: first-time parenting. Scrolling through Twitter, reading about Brexit (as an anxious, just-about-Leave voter), I noticed my moods were rapidly cycling: from glee to gloom, from Bremorse to Brextasy, about every fifteen minutes. Indeed, there’s only been one other time in my life when I’ve been similarly prone to dramatic mood swings, and that’s when I was about to become a

Saturday

James Delingpole

A good Brexit is a hard Brexit

What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably riveting Philip Hammond speech, and head instead for the fringe event run by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor David Myddelton and Charles Moore. I can’t speak for my performance (modesty forbids me) but my fellow panellists were brilliant: funny, incisive and as optimistic as you’d expect of a pair of ardent Brexiteers addressing the victorious home crowd for probably the first time since that happy day in June. (Charles is on stage talking about all of this (and more) in London on Monday, by the way. Tickets here). ‘Which

Hannes Wessels

How Boris and Britain can help Africa to thrive again

It’s almost 60 years since Ghana became independent from Britain. The world celebrated as the sun began to set on the age of European imperialism. ‘African Nationalism’, in the form of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, entered the stage and all cheered the breaking of a golden dawn as the colonial shackles were broken and ‘liberation’ belatedly arrived. Since then, some 200 coups or attempted coups have taken place, 25 heads of state have been assassinated and roughly 50 wars have been fought in Africa. Despite multiple interventions, Africa remains the most crooked continent with illicit transfers out far exceeding the total value of all foreign aid to the continent (currently estimated

Thursday

James Forsyth

Theresa’s Tory love-in

Theresa May doesn’t use an autocue for her speeches. She feels that reading off a screen at the back of the hall makes it far harder to connect with the audience. But the Prime Minister had no need to worry about her connection with the audience at this conference. Tory activists love her; they regard her as one of their own and are rejoicing at her leadership. ‘The grown ups are back in charge’ was a refrain heard frequently in Birmingham this week. The mood of Tory activists has been further improved by what Mrs May has said about Brexit. Her commitment to trigger Article 50 by the end of

William Cook

Who comes after Merkel?

A year from now, 60 million Germans go to the polls in the most important general election in mainland Europe for a generation. The result will define German — and European — politics for the next four years. There are huge questions to be resolved, from the refugee crisis to the financial crisis, but right now the question in Germany is: will Mutti run again? Angela Merkel’s nickname, Mutti (Mummy) is a memento of happier times. A year ago, her position as matriarch of the Bundesrepublik seemed unassailable. And then, last September, she opened Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of fleeing Syrians. Over a million refugees arrived last year.

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

David Davis: I’m 100 per cent sure EU migrants working in Britain can stay after Brexit

Theresa May has gone out of her way to repeatedly reassure people that Brexit means Brexit. But where the Prime Minister has been less eager to offer words of comfort is on the status of EU nationals living and working in Britain. That stony silence has been one of the big themes of the Conservative party’s conference this year. May’s refusal to commit has left a question mark dangling over millions of people. At a Spectator fringe event last night, David Davis went as far as any member of Government (or, indeed, any loyal cabinet minister) to reassuring those from the EU that they wouldn’t be removed from Britain. When

Sunday

The Spectator

Full text: David Davis’s conference speech

Ladies and gentlemen, on the 23rd of June the British people voted for change. And this is going to be the biggest change for a generation: we are going to leave the European Union. It was we, the Conservative Party, who promised the British people a referendum. It was David Cameron, a Conservative Prime Minister, who honoured that promise. And now it will be this government, a Conservative government that will lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union and into a brighter and better future. This must be a team effort. And I am proud to count myself part of Theresa May’s team. I don’t know what it

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Theresa May’s love of class politics shows she’s no heir to Blair

One of the professional drawbacks of coming from Scotland and then moving to London is that I don’t really know an awful lot about England. True, I spent a few years in East Anglia on my way south, but it was a particular part of East Anglia that possibly has rather more dreaming Gothic spires, rusted bicycles and robotics labs than the norm, so I’m not sure it was wholly representative. Still, I know the cities. I have spent enough time in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, say, to know that they are not so terribly different from Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness or even the bits of Edinburgh without the

Saturday

James Forsyth

May’s Brexit offering

Theresa May’s biggest conference dilemma was what to say about Brexit. She doesn’t want to trigger Article 50 yet, or even say when she will do so. Why, because the government hopes that the longer it waits, the more the rest of the EU will be inclined to have preliminary discussions before the actual negotiations start. But May had to have something to say to conference on Brexit. So, May’s team have come up with an announcement that doesn’t involve Article 50 but does enable her to show ‘momentum’, and to claim she is getting on with things. It is a ‘Great Repeal Bill’ which will repeal the 1972 European