John McDonnell, the Labour Party’s Shadow Chancellor, gave a speech today. (For those of you that may have forgotten, what with the Labour Party not having said anything of any relevance and barely made the news since its leadership election, the Labour Party is still, just about, a thing.) It was, as McDonnell’s speeches usually […]
When Theresa May left India last week, completing her first international trip outside of Europe, she boasted that her visit had sealed £1 billion of deals, which would create over 1,300 jobs. “Leaving the European Union”, she declared, “presents us with a world of opportunities.” Even by the ritual hyperbole of these after-action reports, this […]
This is a transcript of a speech given at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on November 14th. My Lord Mayor, My Late Lord Mayor, Your Grace, My Lord Chancellor, Your Excellencies, My Lords, Aldermen, Sheriffs, Chief Commoner, Ladies and Gentlemen. We meet tonight in a world transformed. A year ago, few among us would have predicted the […]
Liberal progressives have lost. The stark truth is that the model that has more or less dominated Western politics for the past three decades is defunct. It could not be more dead. Corbyn kicked us in the ass. Brexit knocked us off our feet. Now President Trump – so weird to write those two words […]
Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, defined the vote as “the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country”. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory on Tuesday night, there will be many Americans who entirely agree. The obvious parallel for the anti-establishment […]
Since the UK voted to leave the EU, British politics has lurched from one crisis to another, as the government and British people struggle to grasp the implications of this choice. After Trump’s unexpected victory, on the back of a promise to reinvigorate a disaffected working class, the stakes of failure for social and economic […]
The West, as we have known it for the past 60 years, died this week. On most issues — security, trade, climate change — Donald Trump has nothing in common with the people who run the other advanced industrialised countries. We are trying to expand and deepen the global trading system. He wants to clog […]
On both sides of the Pond now, the unregarded masses have risen up and given the Establishment a thorough slapping. But the triumph of Trump does provide something of a problem for Brexit. Until now, Liam Fox has been going around telling all and sundry that we can just sign free trade treaties with everywhere […]
And now it gets interesting. In a piece written on the eve of the election, I argued that a Trump victory would be a “peasants’ revolt”, given that it could only come from turning out an overwhelmingly number of white men (and women) without college degrees, who had flocked to his banner even as the […]
It’s one of Edmund Burke’s most famous lines. “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment,” he told the electors of Bristol in 1774. “And he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” But there’s another line, just below, which ought to be equally well known. Parliament, […]
Before the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 was introduced, the UK had pretty much the perfect system for determining when general elections should be called. The prime minister would request a dissolution from the monarch. If the circumstances met a set of circumstances established in precedent for granting an election, one was granted. If they […]
There has been great excitement among the Remain camp today after the Government was told by the courts that it did not have the power to trigger Article 50 unilaterally. Lord Kerr, the author of the article in question, has even popped up to argue that Brexit is still not an inevitability. The truth is, […]
At the Conservative Party Conference this year, the Prime Minister unveiled a cunning plan: she promised a Great Repeal Bill (GRB). The GRB is intended both to repeal the European Communities Act (ECA) 1972, the legislation which gave effect to the supremacy of EU law in the UK, and to convert all EU law into UK […]
If we read the newspapers or listen to the experts, Britain faces two ways to negotiate its way out of the European Union without succumbing to the protectionists’ sirens. The first is a deal à la Norway not only with full access to the common market, but also with full implementation of EU law and […]
Call me a dupe. Call me a patsy. Call me a sucker. Above all, call me wrong. In the days before the EU referendum, I wrote a long essay about why I’d ultimately decided to vote Remain. I was, I said, fully persuaded of the case against the EU. But I couldn’t convince myself to […]
The Belgian region of Wallonia was once called the crossroads of Europe. It sent arms to Spain in medieval times, then became the first place on the continent’s mainland to have an Industrial Revolution, aided by an influx of English industrialists. Wallonia was famous for making fine lace and chocolate, using cocoa imported from colonial holdings […]
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