This year marks the 50th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming leader of the Conservatives, an event that is quite rightly being commemorated. But it is also 51 years since the founding of the Centre for Policy Studies – CapX’s parent organisation, and the intellectual logistics hub of the extraordinary 1980s. Indeed, the Thatcher Revolution would […]
Next year will be 20 years since we first published the ‘Bumper Book of Government Waste’. It put public spending under the spotlight, challenged Whitehall and local government to up their ante and encouraged people to hold ministers and budgetholders to better account. It won an Atlas Award in Washington DC in the process, for […]
Defence has been long associated with bad PR. Whether it’s bombing a Nazi city, burning a disturbed Frenchwoman at the stake, or designing a plane whose radar instruments melt at your fingertips, the negative press sticks with you for years. These days, the reputational issues are of a different order. Sometimes the complaints are a […]
‘Britain mulls Swiss-style ties with Brussels’ ran the Sunday Times headlines. Peculiarly, the date of publication was not 2017 but last weekend. ‘Senior government sources’ were claiming that ‘senior government figures’ are planning to put Britain on the path towards a revamped relationship with the European Union. Whether the sources and the figures were one […]
The British Courts and our legal system are the envy of the world. We know this, because so many people choose to illegally cross the Channel in order to exploit them. An attempt to remove the most spurious claimants for processing in Rwanda very visibly failed this week. Like a naive tom-tom owner, UK courts […]
Marcus Aurelius was emperor during the golden age of Rome, with all the might, learning and general Hollywoodness that entailed. His realm was vast, his legions many, his diktats supreme. Yet burrow into book nine of his Meditations, and you come across this particular aperçu: ‘Don’t hope for Plato’s utopian republic, but be content with […]
The Government in Madrid still does not like the fact that it does not own Gibraltar. I can understand the sentiment. It took this country 350 years to sign a treaty accepting that France won the Hundred Years War. But Madrid’s political stance today is an obsession. Forget the hypocrisy of the Spanish exclaves in […]
If the EU needs a digger to get itself out of its vaccine mess, perhaps it should call the famously Eurosceptic chair of JCB, Lord Bamford. The background will be familiar to most. The European Commission claimed world leadership in its handling of immunisation policy, but in reality has been mired in the stagnancy of […]
Our Foreign Office has touched a very raw nerve. The UK is reportedly refusing to grant full diplomatic standing to the emissaries of Brussels, on the basis that officials from its External Action Service and Commission are not representatives of a sovereign state. This has quickly triggered an angry protest from the EU’s High Representative […]
St Gregory of Tours opened his great History of the Franks with a simple and somewhat unhelpful summary of contemporary events: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.” Much the same can be said of the Brexit Treaty. I would suggest on close review, the sum rests far […]
Epicharmus, a Greek comic writer of the fifth century BC, had this maxim: “Stay sober and remember to be sceptical.” It is as good a piece of advice as we are likely to deploy at present. We are at a time of flux and flex in the Brexit talks. Helpfully, Michel Barnier has reportedly now […]
The EU is to rules what a mouse is to an old pantry door. So no one should be surprised that Downing Street has reportedly been looking at making British law underpinning future UK-EU arrangements airtight. The European Commission and some MEPs might not like that, but they only have themselves and their own twitching […]
This season’s ‘in’-word for policy wonks is ‘Superforecasting’. It is the science, or rather social science, behind trying to nail down the percentage likelihood of a given event happening. What we are witnessing now shows just how important getting this kind of thing right. But when the dust eventually settles, rather than reflect on simply the […]
The nature of the EU’s PR machinery is varied and complex. Some of it is open and direct – the Commission’s spinners selling the official EU line for example. Other aspects are discreet, such as the standard contractual obligation for recipients of development aid to publicise the EU’s role as the corporate donor, right down […]
The attempted defenestration of Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, is a telling pointer to the future shape of the country were Retro-Labour to win an election. It was a plausibly deniable coup, undertaken in support of the leadership yet not seemingly at its behest, by an avant-garde testing the ice. It was conceptually audacious, pursuing […]
Recent days have seen a baffling array of amendments seeking to recast the form Brexit takes. The prospect of MPs delivering a genuine Brexit on most of them has been remote; no more real indeed than ranchers and prospectors in the Old West could genuinely expect to track down the mythical beasts they heard tell […]
The Irish backstop is the spectre that has long haunted the Brexit negotiations. This afternoon, Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox head to Brussels to seek changes or clarifications on that part of the deal that the government hopes will give the deal it life in the House of Commons. It is […]
Despite our long addiction to a free and purple press, a gluttonous surfeit has taken Brexit coverage to a fairly prickly place. Things have come to such a pretty pass that the more hysterically anti-Brexit papers now cover, to their own surprise, reports that the world will not collapse in April in the event of […]
This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. Recent days have seen one Tory MP compared to Aslan, and a tree parked so closely outside 10 Downing Street that the doorway turned into the far side […]
Brexit negotiations have been an Odyssey. Currently, if we are to believe the official Government legal opinion on the Northern Ireland backstop, the ship of state is plotting a perilous course between Scylla and Charybdis. We now know what the Attorney General’s advice to the Prime Minister has been, as the six page text has […]
