The impact of Brexit, linked to wrong-headed right-wing economic and social policies also part of the Conservative-LibDem policy matrix for Britain since 2010, has had the biggest political-economic-social impact on peace-time Britain in more than a century. The political class has disintegrated. Britain was famous for its political stability. Now [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The first months of Brexit are a bit like the phoney war of autumn 1939 and winter-spring of 1940. No-one really know what its full impact will be. One thing is certain. Brexit has not been “done”. We are entering the era of “Brexiternity”. In so many ways Brexit is [...]
