Democracy & Citizenship

This is what Prime Minister, Theresa May, said about Brexit and Scotland back in April last year, when she was Home Secretary and (allegedly) pro-Remain: “..if Brexit isn’t fatal to the European Union, we might find that it is fatal to the Union with Scotland. The SNP have already said that in the event that […]

Today’s big news is that Northern Ireland could get a special relationship with the EU to enable no-border with Ireland. It’s being called “regulatory alignment” between Northern Ireland and the EU. Nobody is yet sure what that means. But in any other name, it might be called staying in the EU Single Market. Or in […]

David Davis only last March said we’d never pay anything like a £50 billion settlement to leave the EU. Boris Johnson said the EU could go and whistle for the money. Priti Patel said the EU should be told to sod off. During the referendum campaign nobody was told anything about the cost of leaving […]

What a bloody nuisance Parliament is to the Tory government these days, when all the Prime Minister wants to do is get on with Brexit. If only Parliament would stop interfering, she and her fellow Brexiter Ministers could make much more progress. Ditto the law. I mean really, why do we need Parliament and the […]

So, has Corbyn seen the light at last on Brexit? Yes, according to columnist Polly Toynbee writing in The Guardian. After his brilliant performance at Prime Minister’s Question Time this week, Ms Toynbee was moved to write: ‘The Labour leader finally grasps what leaving the EU really means: the greatest harm inflicted on the very […]

Senior Tory Brexiters demanded last night that Theresa May exploit Angela Merkel’s political weakness and suspend plans to offer billions of pounds more to the European Union, according to today’s front page of The Times. Talks to form a coalition in Germany collapsed yesterday, and Mrs Merkel said that she was ready for a rerun […]

Winning is undoubtedly a good thing and delivers nice feelings. Being a winner is a positive social role as well. But. There is always a ‘but’, particularly in politics. Including elections, the main championship in modern democracy. Here, being a too strong and clear winner can, after the euphoria from the lovely results is gone, […]

In Berlin this week our Brexit Secretary, David Davis, attempted to give a lecture to the Germans. “Don’t put politics above prosperity,” he said. That seems rich as the ideology of Brexit means doing exactly that: putting politics above the prosperity of Britain. But there were other oxymorons in Mr Davis’s speech. He said he […]

An amendment by Labour to protect our EU rights and protections after Brexit has been defeated in the House of Commons. The Labour front bench sought to amend the EU (Withdrawal) Bill to ensure that after Brexit, EU derived employment rights, environmental protection, health and safety standards and consumer standards can only be amended by […]

The upsides of getting older are relatively few and far between, but one of the best is that you get to annoy younger people by dragging up things from the past that they have no memory of. And so it’s been this week: I’ve been musing on the late 1980s and the oddities of monetary […]