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Today’s High Court ruling in Miller/dos Santos has provoked a flurry of reaction, across the board. To read the comments of some Remainers, this is the first step to reversing the referendum result and building a new, pro-EU consensus in the UK. For Leavers, it’s being called a travesty of democracy and justice. As someone […]
Anyone in hope of elucidation on Brexit this week will have been a bit disappointed, even by recent standards. With submissions to the High Court providing no killer arguments either side – and both sides firmly stating that any loss will be challenged up to the Supreme Court and an immigration debate that has sunk to the […]
Of the many, many frustrations about Brexit, one of the most paradoxical has been the lack of scrutiny. On the one hand, there has been almost endless public criticism and debate about the outcome of the referendum, with endless holes being picked in whatever is offered up by those in positions of power. But on the other, […]
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I found myself listening to the Today programme this morning, with Matteo Renzi being interviewed. Three points struck me about this. One was that I must try listening to the radio more often. More consequentially, the second was that Renzi seemed adamant about the need to disconnect the two […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote on the challenge facing the British eurosceptic movement: the achievement of victory in the referendum removes the key binding agent in the coalition of interests, with many now likely to redirect their activity elsewhere. Since then, we’ve seen some marginal movements in affairs, including the election of Diane James to lead UKIP and […]
Now we’re back into the normal flow of things, I’ve been giving more talks about Brexit, and writing pieces for other sites. As I decried in my previous posts here (and here), a major challenge for pursuing Brexit is that there is no clarity on either side about what the objective might be. That in turn makes it almost impossible […]
So it turns out that Usherwood’s Law is simply that things can always get worse. It’s not quite my childhood dream, but (appositely) it could be worse. Since publishing The Brexit Clusterf**k earlier on, I’ve had lots of feedback on Twitter, essentially boiling down to “you forgot some other things”. Since I’m apparently on a roll here, […]
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 […]
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