Current Affairs

The EU referendum campaign is going to get ‘nasty’, promised those pushing for Britain to leave the EU. In a taste of what’s to come, two Eurosceptic students interrupted a speech by Prime Minister, David Cameron, at a CBI conference yesterday, yelling, “CBI! Voice of Brussels”. The Daily Telegraph reported that the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign […]

Britain has more job vacancies than can be filled by the native workforce. That, in a nutshell, is why we need migrants. The country has a chronic skills shortage and without migrants helping to fill that gap, Britain – and Britons – would be poorer. Britain now has more people at work than ever before. […]

One of the staples of academic understanding of the EU is the notion of the two-level game. The idea – first articulated by Robert Putnam – is simply that there are situations where you can only understand an actor’s intentions and actions in one game/interaction if you also accept that these intentions and actions are shaped by their […]

A guest contribution by Başak Alpan, from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Here’s one of the few good things about being a political science professor in Turkey: elections are never only boring econometrical calculations that no one is interested in, but each election gives you an ample amount of shock, perplexity, and challenge to cope […]

Nordic countries generally have a good rep. Whether it’s their pop music or their high level of social and political development, they tend to get looked up at. But just as there’s a Ylvis for every ABBA, so too is there a David Cameron for every Francis Fukuyama. Cameron doesn’t want a ‘Norwegian option’ for the UK, by which he […]

Many of the people most affected by the EU referendum decision will have no say in it. If Britain votes to leave the EU, then all Britons will lose something that many Britons cherish – European citizenship. Under EU law, all citizens of the European Union have joint citizenship: their own nationality, and European citizenship. […]

A (sadly) consistent theme of British policy towards the EU has been widespread ignorance. I recall being told in my undergraduate EU law module a story of the first British judge, Alexander Mackenzie Stuart, setting off in 1973 to Luxembourg with the firm intention of trying to establish the supremacy of EC law, apparently unaware […]

Brexit options should be made clear Free movement across most of our continent is a fundamental right of all EU citizens. But if Eurosceptics have their way and Britain leaves the EU, British people will most likely lose the right to move freely across Europe, and citizens from the rest of Europe will lose the […]

More and more academics and institutions are discussing how to address climate change in their own activities. Our own institution, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has recently drafted a Travel Strategy, and an accompanying Working paper (‘Towards a Culture of Low-Carbon Research for the 21st Century’) to reduce our collective travel impact on […]

With the Paris climate summit around the corner, and substantial research efforts to catalogue and understand an increasing number of climate policy initiatives, there is little doubt that much is already happening to address climate change.[1] But what does all this effort really amount to? And how will we know? One way to improve our […]