The EU

So next Thursday is the crunch day for the Brexit negotiations, apparently. To listen to much of the media and many government ministers, Boris Johnson will roll up to Brussels to bang heads together and get a deal over the line. Unless, of course, he decides not to go at all. To say that the […]

Tim Seidenschnur By studying higher education as an institutional field, we focus on an area where European integration has in general been regarded as positive. However, the current period is characterized by basic disagreements among the political parties and the electorates about the preferred nature of the future European order, which causes uncertainties and tensions. […]

So now we get the proposal. Yesterday’s release of the letter to the Commission and the explanatory notes was long awaiting, albeit without much holding of breath. Number 10’s approach has long been this: to raise the fears of a no-deal outcome, then to rush in with a last-minute offer (a ‘fair and reasonable’ one, […]

Brexit campaigners often claim that the EU isn’t democratic. But in many ways, it’s more democratic than our system of democracy in the UK where: We have an unelected second chamber. We have an unelected head of state (who has no real power to intervene on important issues). We have an old-fashioned voting system of […]

Compare our past Prime Ministers to the current incumbent. Whatever you may have thought of them at the time, by contrast to Boris Johnson, they now seem positively honourable and principled. Of course, none of those past Prime Ministers was perfect, and all of them had vastly different policies, some of which you may have […]

Boris Johnson was at a Climate Change Conference in New York today as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that his prorogation of Parliament was unlawful. For sure, the climate for Johnson has changed. But so far, he seems to think he can weather the storm. The beleaguered Prime Minister said that he “strongly disagreed” with the court’s […]

Sofya Kopelyan Nothing can keep a genuine community of scholars from academic discussions – neither a malfunctioning projector, nor a shortage of sockets, nor hard chairs from the Communist times. Even more so when discussions centre on the governance of knowledge as the key to economic growth and public well-being. This year’s Knowledge Politics and […]

Today’s crisis in British government is the biggest since 1974, when a miner’s strike challenged the authority of the Conservative government and led to a three-day working week. To break the impasse, Ted Heath called a general election on the issue: ‘Who governs, an elected government or the miner’s union?’ The Brexit crisis raises the […]

Calling for a general election to settle Brexit may seem a neat solution, but it is risky. The two parties with the clearest views on EU membership, the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party, would both be grossly under-represented in the new Parliament, whatever their share of the popular vote. Moreover, there is a real […]

Yesterday, the European Parliament had one of its regular discussions about Brexit, following the meeting between Boris Johnson and Jean-Claude Juncker in Luxembourg. As before, the Parliament passed a resolution to the effect that a deal was desirable, a no-deal was very bad, and citizens’ rights must be protected in every case. Rather than discuss […]