The EU

• Click photo to enlarge   All except one of Theresa May’s first Brexit Cabinet were in favour of the EU or its Single Market prior to last year’s Referendum. Now, all her Cabinet are taking the country on the road to Brexit, even though most of them had previously urged that such an action would […]

What does the EU have to do with ‘sport diplomacy’? In a post published on this site fifteen months ago, I reported on the reflections of a high-level group that was set up by Commissioner Tibor Navracsics in 2015 and that produced a report with a series of recommendations in June 2016. Since then, the […]

Today in Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May said of Brexit, “The negotiations are in progress and very good progress has been made in those negotiations.” Did you notice her nose grow an inch? We can’t believe anything this government tells us. The Brexit negotiations are going disastrously wrong. Did Mrs May fly to Brussels on […]

Just two days before last year’s EU referendum Theresa May insisted there would have to be border controls with Ireland if the UK voted to leave the European Union. She said then that it was “inconceivable” that there would not be any changes on border arrangements with the Republic of Ireland if Brexit happened. As […]

The European Union consists of 28 member states. All treaty changes or enlargement of the EU require the unanimous consent of every single member, however large or small. The Union of the United Kingdom consists of four member states: England, Scotland, Wales and the province of Northern Ireland. In the referendum, two of them voted […]

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 […]

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 […]