A (sadly) consistent theme of British policy towards the EU has been widespread ignorance. I recall being told in my undergraduate EU law module a story of the first British judge, Alexander Mackenzie Stuart, setting off in 1973 to Luxembourg with the firm intention of trying to establish the supremacy of EC law, apparently unaware […]

So here we are, phase two of Dave’s renegotiation-and-referendum gambit. The preliminaries have been dealt with and now we have the groups likely to form the official campaigns launched. I’ve talked elsewhere about the group formation and the issues associated with that, and that’s certainly been much of the focus of attention so far in the media. […]

About a month ago, and to some fanfare, Nigel Farage launched a ‘Say no the EU tour‘. The press coverage (e.g. BBC) called it the UKIP referendum campaign, the website talks about why to the leave the EU and Farage himself said that he would be campaigning from now until the vote takes place next year. All […]

Last week, I wrote about intensity and direction as tensions in the campaign groups: this week I want to look at another faultline, namely that between ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’. I use the quote marks, because radicalism is very much in the eye of the beholder, so it is hard to move beyond any subjective interpretation. Indeed, it […]

As we move into party conference season, so we also enter the world of the official campaigns for the EU referendum. Both Remain and Leave sides now have their contenders for official status in the throws of activation. This notwithstanding the continuing lack of clarity about what’s being renegotiated or by when: the calculation has clearly been that to wait for […]

It’s not been often that I’ve had cause to write about Labour and the EU in the past four or five years: apart from Ed Miliband’s semi-drift into referendum commitments last year, there hasn’t really been much of a policy. A general sense that it’s A Good Thing, but largely a continuation of the positional policy-making that […]

I’m just back from the UACES annual conference in Bilbao where there was a lot of talk about the referendum and about euroscepticism. Nice as it was to have good turnouts for those panels, and to be buttonholed in the coffee breaks and drinks receptions, it was also clear that there was widespread disquiet about […]