Current Affairs

I will freely admit that I have shied away from getting into the whole question of Retained EU Law, primarily because it’s much more about law in the UK than it is about EU law per se. I know enough to know that I don’t know much. However, the question is one that cannot be ignored. […]

As you might have noticed, I have recently become a Senior Fellow of the ESRC-funded UK in a Changing Europe initiative, working on UK-EU relations. For present purposes, it mainly means I carry on doing this work, but now with more access to resources, and with a plan. That plan is basically to try and make […]

French-German commemorations are a reassuring routine, especially on the governmental level. They are the occasion of some shoulder-tapping, large smiles that are not even unsincere, welcome obligations to bask in the sunshine of what has been achieved over all these years rather than in the shadow of the challenges that lie ahead. And contrary to […]

On 22 January 2023, France and Germany celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, rightly praised as a milestone in Europe’s post-war history. But the Treaty only institutionalised on governmental level a process towards reconciliation that civil society had already initiated without waiting for politics. This is the third post of a series of […]

On 22 January 2023, France and Germany celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, rightly praised as a milestone in Europe’s post-war history. But the Treaty only institutionalised on governmental level a process towards reconciliation that civil society had already initiated without waiting for politics. This is the second post of a series of […]

On 22 January 2023, France and Germany celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, rightly praised as a milestone in Europe’s post-war history. But the Treaty only institutionalised on governmental level a process towards reconciliation that civil society had already initiated without waiting for politics. This is the first post of a series of […]

Yesterday I found myself on the brink of an interesting discussion about Brexit. Which possibly says something about me, as much as it does about the subject. We’d started talking about public opinion and the emergence of what looks like a more robust move towards thinking that EU membership is a good thing. John Curtis […]

It’s often helpful to try and tackle familiar problems from unfamiliar angles: it makes you think again about what’s what and maybe it opens up some new ideas. And so I present my t-shirt. [yes, that is a finely-tuned physique it contains, but let’s leave that for another time] A night’s sleep disturbed by the […]

Last week, Anton Spisak at the Tony Blair Institute produced an excellent paper on how the UK-EU relationship might be fixed. I heartily recommend it to you as an overview of where we are and what might be the way forward. Of course, being a practical-minded sort, I did have some queries, as set out […]

One good reason for doing this regular tracking report is that is means we (i.e. I) can abreast of what is an ever-changing landscape of interactions between the EU and the UK. As a case in point, I’d rather missed that the past couple of weeks have been packed with meetings of the numerous Trade […]