by Brendan Donnelly, Director, The Federal Trust This article was first published on the LSE BrexitVote blog. When the Conservative members of the European Parliament first formed in the early 1990s a joint parliamentary group with the MEPs from the European Peoples Party, there was a certain condescending [...]
by Monica Threlfall (writing in a personal capacity), Reader in European Politics, London Metropolitan University The Leave people are always saying they want “our sovereignty back“. But for what purpose? What is this sovereignty and for whom is it supposed to work? Not for ordinary people. Sovereignty is a [...]
by Dr Tim Oliver, Dahrendorf Fellow on Europe-North America Relations, LSE Ideas Further referendums on Britain’s European question could happen whatever the result of June’s vote. In a recent report for the Federal Trust, Why the EU Referendum Will Not be the End of the Story, Dr Tim Oliver [...]
The EU provides often-overlooked economic benefits for the UK By Viara Bojkova, Head of Geo-Economics Programme & Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute. The big campaigns for the UK to stay in or leave the EU paint pictures of alternative futures with a large brush. ‘We [...]
by Baroness Quin, House of Lords; Council Member of the Federal Trust 4th August 2015 This article first appeared on the European Movement website. One of the biggest myths about the circumstances in which Britain joined the EEC (as it was then) in 1972 was that what we were being [...]
Removing regulatory burdens to make the EU more user-friendly By Richard Seebohm, former Representative in Brussels of the Quaker Council for European Affairs June 2015 As Samuel Johnson once said, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I wonder if the term sovereignty is not tarred with the same [...]
by Brendan Donnelly This article first appeared on euroblog, the Blog of the European Movement: http://euromove.blogactiv.eu/ During the referendum on voting reform in 2011, it was sometimes claimed by advocates of the present British electoral system, misleadingly known as “first past the post,” that it tended to produce definite [...]
A Personal View from Brendan Donnelly It is sometimes said that David Cameron regards Tony Blair as his political model. The European policies of the two Prime Ministers may appear superficially very different. Mr. Blair presented himself as fundamentally favourable to the European Union, and Mr. Cameron is at best [...]
Review by Brendan Donnelly Much of this short book by Professor Jan Zielonka of Oxford University is rightly devoted to the euro. It is on the success or failure of the single European currency that the answer to the question of the book’s title “Is the EU doomed?” will essentially [...]
by Brendan Donnelly A number of lessons can be learned from the diplomatic reverse suffered by the British government in its attempts to prevent Mr. Juncker from becoming President of the European Commission. 1. British governments are prone grossly to exaggerate the extent of support they enjoy for their political [...]
