My old friend Chris Deerin keeps having a go at me about the coming EU referendum – most recently, here on CapX. Chris is finding it hard to move on from last year’s Scottish referendum, in which he and I campaigned on the same side: “When I read a tweet by Dan Hannan saying ‘How […]
My old friend Chris Deerin keeps having a go at me about the coming EU referendum – most recently, here on CapX. Chris is finding it hard to move on from last year’s Scottish referendum, in which he and I campaigned on the same side: “When I read a tweet by Dan Hannan saying ‘How […]
David Cameron is calling in favours from world leaders at present. He wants them to opine that Britain, everything considered, ought to stay in the EU. They often oblige: heads of government do that sort of thing for each other. So we may be pretty certain that, when India’s Narendra Modi comes to London next […]
Poland, once again, has defied a European trend. Elsewhere in Europe, parties of the populist Left are on the rise. In Poland, they face extirpation. The Polish Left didn’t just fail to win office; it failed to win seats. The parties represented in the Sejm cover the rest of the spectrum: free-market, nationalist, conservative, Christian […]
You want a practical example of what’s wrong with our membership of the EU? Consider the ham-fisted Brussels regulation that now threatens the viability of our commercial ports. British ports are private, profitable and plentiful. They tend to be smaller than their European equivalents, and are dotted more thickly along our coasts. British ports, unusually, […]
Look, I’m just going to come out and say this. Zoe Williams is a great writer: original, clever and with a fine turn of phrase. Some of my conservative friends regard my admiration for her as bizarre – fetishistic, even. Poor Zoe has been something of a hate-figure on the Right since she defended the […]
There was a mother at one of my children’s previous schools, a loud American, who was deeply unpopular with the other mums, but not with me. Her offence, in the eyes of the other women, was to be forever complaining. The reading programme was out-of-date, she averred, the music lessons inadequate, the maths too easy. […]
Like many bullies, Donald Trump has a dishing-it-out-but-not-taking-it problem. He has systematically insulted the other Republican presidential candidates, often in the crudest, most foul-mouthed way. But he goes ballistic at the slightest criticism. When, for example, Rich Lowry, the highly respected editor of the National Review, observed that Carly Fiorina had emasculated him with the […]
Horrible Histories, the children’s books and TV programmes, have arguably created Britain’s most historically literate generation. British children no longer learn the order of England’s kings and queens by reciting “Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste…” Rather, they chant the Chas-and-Dave style number from the show: “I’m William the Conqueror, my enemies stood no chance…” Cleopatra’s murderous […]
The Conservatives couldn’t have asked for a better backdrop to their 2015 party conference. Inside the Manchester convention centre, serious men and women made serious decisions. Outside, a pack of yahoos snarled and spat and shrieked. Who looked reasonable? Leftist mobs are nothing new: they have been screaming their invective at Tory conference-goers since at […]
“We export more to Belgium than we do to the whole of China!” Denis MacShane once told me during a debate on leaving the EU, with the air of a man slamming four aces onto the table. “Yes, and that’s precisely our problem,” I replied. “Which has the greater long-term potential?” We’ve been hearing a […]
Most of the nations represented in the Rugby World Cup used to have the same national anthem. “God Save The Queen” was near-universal across the Commonwealth, and even now retains formal status in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and various Caribbean and Pacific territories. But, during the second half of the twentieth century, most of these […]
In politics, whenever you offer a foreign example, in however narrow and limited a context, you are guaranteed – guaranteed – to be told an unrelated fact about the country you’ve cited. You admire Estonia’s approach to shale extraction? “You can’t compare us to Estonia: they’ve got Putin on their border.” You think Singapore has […]
Harry Mount is the master of, so to speak, the QI book. Like the authors of the BBC show, he is able to hold our interest in the unlikeliest subjects by telling us things that come as a surprise, even when think ourselves well-read. An eager truffle-hunter, he has snuffled his way in previous books […]
Rule One: It’s Always Our Fault. A Syrian boy drowns in Turkey trying to reach Greece? Britain’s fault! A boat bound for Italy overturns in Libyan waters? Britain’s fault! Illegal immigrants force their way through Hungary toward Austria? Britain’s fault! It’s our fault for bombing Libya. It’s our fault for not bombing Syria. It’s our […]
“It’s all your fault,” a Labour-supporting friend told me, crossly. “If you and your mates hadn’t started this open primaries bollocks, Labour wouldn’t now be on the point of self-destruction”. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” I replied sonorously, quoting Prospero. And I do acknowledge it. Eleven years ago, Douglas Carswell and I set […]
Look at this photograph. What do you see? A chap trying to grab the camera, right? Maybe he and the photographer are horsing around, or maybe he’s genuinely annoyed but, either way, it’s pretty obvious what he’s doing. Obvious, at least, to anyone looking neutrally at the image. But if you have been told that […]
The free movement of people, we keep being told, is a fundamental principle of the EU. Its definition has been stretched to cover benefits claims, subsidised university places and voting entitlements. But it plainly doesn’t cover the actual free movement of people – at least, not of British people wishing to move freely through Calais. […]
The Telegraph’s headline sounded promising: “George Osborne: Britain should return to a trade relationship with the EU”. Trade was what we thought we were signing up for in the first place. If the government could negotiate its way out of the political aspects of membership, and retain only the commercial, my guess is that 80 […]
Imagine that a gang of regulars from your local pub asked you to join them in an investment scheme. Suppose you politely declined, only for them to start pestering you. Listen, they say, if you don’t get involved you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. In fact, if you insist on staying out, […]
