Politics & Public Policy

Olivier Bégin-Caouette In the Europe of Knowledge, there are strong pressures on national governments to increase funding for research; one of Europe 2020’s headline indicators is to increase combined public and private investment in R&D to the equivalent of 3% of the GDP (see graph below). Beyond the amount of resources invested, it appears critical […]

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 […]

In my house, “rock’n’roll” has a very specific meaning. When uttered in the context of getting people out of the house it denotes that we have arrived at the actual moment of departure and no more delays will be tolerated: everyone is moving to the door.* Put differently, I have established a credible set of […]

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 […]