In last week’s post I wrote about the strategic incoherence of post-Brexit politics, despite the more pragmatic approach embodied in the Windsor Framework. The fate of that agreement, specifically, remains somewhat unclear. The DUP continue to make noises that could mean rejecting it, but might not, whilst Brexiter MPs are restless (£) that they will … Read more
This week David Lammy, the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, gave a major and important speech at Chatham House. It wasn’t by any means all about Brexit, but, even where it was not, it could be read as the outlines of a serious post-Brexit foreign policy. That is something which, along with many others, I’ve been … Read more
The peril of writing a blog which is contemporaneous with events is that it can suddenly be overtaken by those events. Actually, in the years I’ve been writing this blog that has happened surprisingly rarely, but it certainly did with last week’s post. There, I wrote about how Brexit was seemingly in the process of … Read more
I want to begin this post by saying, unequivocally, that of all the many dimensions of the horrors unfolding in Ukraine, Brexit is very low on the list of things to give attention to. Like, I would suppose, most people I have been horrified by the Russian invasion but also inspired and deeply moved by … Read more
I’ve noticed recently that I’ve started making cynical jokes on my Twitter account, which I set up to disseminate serious news about Brexit, as well as posts on this blog. They aren’t funny enough to be worth linking to (well maybe this one is), but I think my new-found levity reflects a certain grim despair … Read more
Over the last few years, one of the most acute commentators on Brexit has been Jonathan Lis, and in a recent article he concludes that the three fundamental consequences of Brexit are that “if you erect trade barriers, trade will be harder. If you gut the workforce, there will be fewer people to do necessary … Read more
There’s something like an emerging consensus that the Afghanistan crisis has also created a crisis for Britain’s post-Brexit geo-political strategy and, in particular, shows both the emptiness of the ‘Global Britain’ slogan and the urgent need to increase co-operation with the EU. It’s a message that can be found in recent articles by former National … 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
In my previous post I wrote about the effects of Brexit as being a slow puncture gradually degrading the economy and well-being more generally. I mentioned that one aspect of that is the structural, demography-related, problem of labour shortages across all sectors, but hadn’t at that point read an excellent Bloomberg report published a couple … Read more
One way of telling the story of Brexit is that it was sold to the British public as, and perhaps believed by its advocates to be, a project to regain sovereignty but without any economic costs and, even, with economic benefits. Since that was impossible, when it came to be delivered, sovereignty was prioritised despite … Read more