What has happened to my country? I have been a student, activist, MP, minister and writer in its political life for five decades. Never has it been so broken, divided, confused, uncertain about its future. The Queen’s death marked the last moment when the United Kingdom was briefly itself. Britain [...]
This book is one of the most important ever written on Britain’s tortuous relationship with Europe in the last 50 years. It has been dismissed as a book written by a haut fonctionnaire, what in English would be called a Whitehall Mandarin. Nothing could be further from the truth. The [...]
What is it about England’s right-wing journalism and France? The obsessive hate against France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, in papers like the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Spectator is without precedent. As news arrived of the death of 27 refugees drowned in the Straits of Dover, the Daily Mail summed up the style and language of the Francophobe [...]
The extraordinarily tight outcome of the German elections has created the danger for the European Union of prolonged negotiations before the next federal government can be formed, lasting even as long as until Christmas. However, it also contains a most significant opportunity. This is not merely due to the defection [...]
This essay was commissioned by Léo Keller on behalf of the Blogazoi blog, as part of a collection to be published following the German election. It is over 21 years since Angela Merkel took over from Wolfgang Schäuble as leader of the CDU, Germany’s most consistently successful political party. Schäuble, the [...]
From Unidentified Political Object to European Democracy Thirty years after the foundation of the European Union by virtue of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty the nature of the Union has been established at last. At the time of its creation as successor of the European Communities the EU used to be [...]
6 years ago I published a book “Brexit. How Britain Will Leave Europe.” It came out before the May 2015 election. It set out all the reasons, based on 20 years of door knocking in what we now call a red wall seat, why I thought that if a populist [...]
Within ten days after the finalisation of the UK withdrawal from the EU, the European Union is to start an ambitious Conference on the Future of Europe. The aim of the Conference is to discuss the place of the citizens in the construction of the Union and to underpin European [...]
In May 2021 Northern Ireland will mark the hundredth year of its existence. These years have been marked by long periods of turmoil rather than any sense of contentment or stability. There has been and remains an atmosphere of unease. Governments in Northern Ireland have been marked by periods of [...]
The author wishes to dedicate the present essay to the memory of the ever inspiring Michael Burgess, in live Founder and Director of the Centre for Federal Studies at the University of Kent. For decades, it has been common practice in academic circles to refer to the EU as [...]
