It’s impossible to escape the fact that Britain is now caught in an escalating crisis. It has multiple moving parts which interact in complex ways, but each of them is to a greater or lesser extent linked to Brexit. Daily, the dishonest promises made for Brexit and the reckless irresponsibility with which it was implemented … Read more
It’s now exactly five years since I started this blog and, as it enters its sixth year, with a pleasing symmetry, it will today have its six millionth visit. I must admit that I didn’t really anticipate when I started that I’d still be writing it now, over 300 posts and about a million words … Read more
In recent posts I’ve been using the analogy of a slow puncture for the damage caused by Brexit with the political consequences being muffled as a result. An excellent piece by Rafael Behr this week makes an essentially similar argument: “Brexit is an unspectacular failure” and this precludes “a realistic conversation about the relationship that … Read more
At the corner of my road is a display board for local notices and, recently, the council have put one up about a project to support local businesses and community organizations to re-open as Covid restrictions ease. Prominently and, to my mind, poignantly displayed on the sign is an EU logo, for this project is … Read more
As predicted in recent posts, including last week’s, there is no sign that the government’s confrontational approach to the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) is going to change. Neither the Biden intervention nor the EU’s agreement to extend the chilled meats grace period, plus other recent flexibilities, is going to make any difference. What may just … Read more
David Frost presumably speaks for the whole government in his claim that Britain is “now looking forward”. It can only be presumed, since virtually no other government minister, including the Prime Minister, actually says anything in public about Brexit any more. That in itself is remarkable, as if Brexit was either a triviality or, perhaps … Read more
To anyone who has followed, even cursorily, reports about the effects of Brexit since the vote to leave, and especially since the end of the transition period, or even just in the last week or so, this week’s Queen’s Speech, with its disconnected rag-bag of policies, will suggest that the government inhabits a strangely parallel … Read more
We have now passed the 100-day point since ‘economic Brexit’ – the end of the transition – and to mark it Yorkshire Bylines put together an excellent series of briefings from regular and guest contributors (disclosure: I am one of them). Taken together these provide as good a summary as there is of what has … Read more
The loud disputes between the UK and the EU of just a few weeks ago over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) have quietened and there has still been no public response from the EU to the UK’s new roadmap for its implementation (though there are rumours of “disappointment”[£]). Nor, so far as I know, has … Read more
The ‘big picture’ of the economic consequences of Brexit continues to get filled out, as discussed in an excellent panel event hosted by the UK in a Changing Europe think tank this week. But behind that unfolding disaster lie a whole host of ‘micro-damages’ (although for those involved they may be anything but trivial). In … Read more