Last week the Government announced it was to start negotiations for a trade deal with Greenland. Right on schedule, the continuity remain crowd went into meltdown, pointing out that Greenland has a very small economy and that we already had a deal with them when we were members of the EU. The outcry was so […]
For a project that was so often dressed up as about freeing Britain from red tape, the Government took a decidedly unambitious approach to dealing with EU regulations when we finally left. In fact, Boris Johnson ended up rolling over so many regulations that his legislation ended up being unofficially dubbed the ‘Continuity Bill’. This […]
Within the next week Northern Ireland’s Agriculture Minister Edwin Poots is expected to order officials to stop checking goods at the Irish Sea ‘border’ between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The province’s First Minister, Paul Givan, confirmed yesterday that his Democratic Unionist Party colleague would act unilaterally to halt Protocol checks at Ulster’s ports. Mr […]
In an article in this week’s Sunday Telegraph, Foreign Secretary and Brexit negotiator Liz Truss reiterated that the UK will trigger Article 16 if the EU does not make rapid concessions on the Northern Ireland Protocol. For more than six months, ministers have directed this threat at Brussels, as the Government tried in vain to dismantle […]
Who is the bigger expert on the Belfast Agreement? Might it be Lord Trimble, the former Ulster Unionist who brokered the deal and won Nobel peace prize? Or could it be Tim Farron, who spent two undistinguished years as the leader of the Liberal Democrats and whose career will likely be remembered only by the […]
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 […]
If there’s one area where Britain can benefit from better post-Brexit regulation, it’s pulling ourselves away from blanket bans on chemicals that are critical to making the modern world cleaner, cheaper and faster. PFAS, or Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of over 4,700 individual chemicals, each with specific purposes, that are fundamental to […]
At 6.30am on Monday morning, the Northern Ireland Protocol saga took a sinister new twist. In the predominantly unionist town of Newtownards, two masked and armed men hijacked a double-decker bus and set it alight, seemingly in protest against the Irish Sea border. The leaders of unionist political parties, including the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson, […]
The pandemic did strange things to our sense of time. Days stretched out, months slipped by. So when a row with France over fishing rights ended up at the top of the news agenda again, I had to actually check that this story really has been playing out for almost a year. Back then, I […]
When we voted to leave the European Union, it was to escape the rule of Brussels. Freedom to decide our own laws for ourselves was as a key reason why so many people voted the way that they did in the 2016 referendum. Exiting the EU has given us a new mandate to take a fresh […]
So, it turns out that the original version of the Northern Irish Protocol wasn’t the best of both worlds after all. Nor was it the inevitable and necessary consequence of Brexit. Those of us who were paying attention throughout the negotiations with the European Union knew this already, of course. But there has been a […]
In the late 2000s, Tony Blair’s name was being touted as a potential president of the European Council. It never happened but I made a short film for Andrew Neil’s late-night BBC politics programme arguing that it would be a good thing if it did, and that the European cause and Britain’s own interests would […]
Just when you begin to think there is nothing new under the sun in British politics, along comes a conference fringe event to set you straight. So, thanks then to Chris Loder, the Conservative MP for West Dorset, who yesterday said that he hoped supermarket supply chains would ‘crumble’ and ‘break’ so ‘the farmer down the […]
Sir Keir Starmer had waited 17 months and 23 days to deliver his first conference speech as Labour leader – and some of those watching probably felt it took almost as long for him to finish making it. If the central aim of the near 90-minute speech was ‘to understand and persuade the voters who […]
Yesterday, Northern Ireland’s four explicitly unionist parties issued a ‘declaration’ affirming their opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol. This statement was timed to coincide with the anniversary of ‘Ulster Day’ in 1912. 109 years ago, on the 28th of September, almost half a million people in the province expressed their commitment to a ‘cherished position […]
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 […]
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