Politics & Public Policy

While the debate on Brexit remains heated, with all eyes fixed on the ongoing negotiation process and its consequences for both the EU and the UK, it is important to remind oneself that the United Kingdom does not only consist of the four ‘home nations’, but also of a variety of regions. In other words: […]

I’m wrapping up for a summer break, just as more Brexit stuff is about to be released: tant pis. While we wait for that – and it might not come to much – I’d like to revisit a theme that has long floated about the Brexit debate, namely the weak/strong paradox. Simply put, many of those who argue(d) […]

As everyone (semi-)winds down for the August break, and the pace of events slows, it is a useful point to consider Article 50 and Brexit once more. While I have usually looked at this from the British end, this time I’d like to look at it from the EU’s perspective, not only because I’m now […]

Today, UK in a Changing Europe publishes its report on “The Cost of No Deal“, to which I’ve contributed. Here I consider some of the wider ramifications. There is one than one way that the Article 50 process might fail to reach an agreement and it is useful to consider each of these in turn, […]

It might not have been immediately obvious, but we are now into the meat of Article 50.  Even with a first cycle of meetings now done, it has taken a press conference from Michel Barnier to make any impression on the British media, and even then only to comparing notes on whistling. All of which prompts some reflection […]

What is needed to make the Paris Agreement a success? This blog post focuses on one of the most central but underappreciated elements – the periodic reviews of progress.  States must of course make ambitious and credible contributions in the first place.  But if there is no system to ensure that they are monitored and […]

Last week, I snuck in an extra posting, as part of my reflections on a workshop I attended at Sussex on Brexit and euroscepticism. As I mentioned in passing, there were other ideas that floated around my head that day, including this one. One of the more persistent ideas that I have tried to communicate to […]

I’ve spent the day down at Sussex, talking euroscepticism and Brexit with a highly-informed group of colleagues. As our debate ranged over a wide terrain (see my live-ish tweeting here), several questions kept recurring, first and foremost of which was whether the UK was a special case, or a potential model of Eurosceptic activists to follow. As you […]

About a year ago, I attended a meeting in Cambridge, to discuss the aftermath of the EU referendum. Alongside all the rage and fury of those who felt they had been cheated, one woman asked me specifically about how to mitigate the impact of Brexit on her area of expertise, namely the conservation of rare […]

Ever since I started to talk to the French about their political system and listened to their perceptions of what was going wrong in the Fifth Republic – a little more than three decades now – I had this impression, unbacked by any robust statistical evidence, of a quite large majority at the centre of […]