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UPDATED: read a second installation here, after all your comments. Summer is over: winter is coming in the world of Brexit. As politicians return from their sojourns in the sun, they open up their emails and briefings to find that things are going about as badly as they could. I’m writing this at the end […]
At a first cut, the 23 June referendum result has been the clearest possible vindication of the many years of concerted action by British Eurosceptics: on a high turnout, a majority of people voted to leave the EU, even if many of them wouldn’t have particularly described themselves as Eurosceptics. The result has opened up […]
A version of this post was presented to the Conway Hall Ethic Society on 24 July 2016. The history of UK-European relations has been one of muddling through. At no point in the past 70 years has there been a plan or a strategy: that’s as true today as it was in the 1950s. And the […]
Another day, another upheaval in British politics. In the 21 days since the EU referendum, we’ve had more changes of more consequence than in any time since the second world war. All very grand to say that, but where are we going with all this? Until yesterday, it was very hard to say, precisely because […]
It’s telling that almost all the British public debate since Friday’s announcement of the result of the EU referendum has been about British politics: who’s succeeding David Cameron? What’s happening to Jeremy Corbyn? Or Scotland? Almost nothing has been discussed about how this decision will play out with the rest of the European Union. At […]
Thursday’s historic vote was specifically about British membership of the European Union, but subsequent events appear to have raised the question of whether the decision to leave will actually result in it happening. Here we consider some aspects of this. Why it will happen Constitutionally, any referendum in the UK is advisory, since Parliament is […]
With last than a week to go until the EU referendum, the campaigns on both sides are now in overdrive. Since late January, we have been following the social media campaigns, particularly on Twitter, to understand better the messages that different groups are making, the way in which they frame and the extent to which […]
Looking around in these final weeks before the 23 June vote, there hasn’t much reason to feel that the EU referendum has come to occupy a central place in the lives of the British public. While the papers and the news programmes have been full of stories and arguments, this hasn’t seemed to fully translate […]
As we’ve moved into the last stretch of the referendum, we’ve seen the emergence of a new dynamic: the referendum-as-general-election. In setting out more clearly what a post-Brexit future would look like, the key figures in the Leave campaign – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling and Priti Patel – have also been sketching what a […]
One of the most interesting aspects of the EU referendum campaign so far has been the extent to which things haven’t changed. Six weeks into the official period, we still have polling that gives no clear advantage to either side, nor even an indication that attitudes have changed at all: the don’t knows still make […]
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