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As we enter a period of heightened debate about customs arrangements, it’s useful to consider who holds what power in the Article 50 process. As rational choice bods like to tell us, the more people who hold vetoes, the harder it is to please them all and more chance there is of non-agreement. However, in […]
Yesterday’s Labour motion on Brexit marked an important step for the party. For the first time it had managed to push the government on the strategy for the Article 50 negotiations, leaving the government little option but to engage in some Parliamentary wrangling to try and deflect the on-coming threat of backseat rebellion. Keir Starmer looked to […]
This is, of course, the big news from the past week. The whole Farage/Trump/ambassador thing is little more than a febrile combination of unwillingness to follow protocol, mutual back-scratching and intentional destablising, while the Autumn Statement simply underlines that no-one in government really knows what Brexit means. But the resumption of legal contests – now in the Supreme […]
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 […]
Christmas is always a tricky time for politicians: on the one hand, everyone’s packed up for a break after a long autumn, but on the other, there’s usually something that needs urgent attention, like a flood. However, on balance this Christmas past has been generally quite quiet on the referendum front, before bursting back on […]
This is another one of those weeks that hasn’t shaped up too well for Jeremy Corbyn: between Syria and tomorrow’s Oldham by-election, the seemingly perpetual cavalcade of tricky situations and own-goals just carries on for the Labour leader. Regardless of how the Syria vote today turns out or how much of a battering the party takes tomorrow, Corbyn […]
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 […]
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 […]
As we enter the last 200 days of this current Parliament, it’s perhaps useful to spend a moment thinking about where the UK finds itself in relation to the EU. But this is a very reductive reading of the situation. Let’s start by considering UKIP, seeming standard-bearer that it is of the anti-EU movement. Carswell’s […]
It’s conference session again and so a useful time to gauge where parties are at with their positions on the EU. Labour’s leadership largely avoided the issue, mainly because of the continuing pressure from various factions to press for a referendum on membership. Given Miliband’s anticipation (justified or not) that he will be in Number 10 in […]
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