This article was first published on Sceptical Scot. Thirty years ago, on October 3 1990, I was standing among a million people in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin observing and reporting on the ceremonies celebrating the rebirth of a united Germany. A streaker briefly interrupted the profoundly good-natured, [...]
The United Kingdom (UK) and what is now the European Union (EU) were intertwined for nearly half a century. Consequently, Brexit means more than the UK removing itself from the EU. It involves extracting the EU from the UK. The four years after the EU referendum of 23 June 2016 [...]
Crucial Election Looms In just seven months time, Scottish voters will head to the polls to elect a new cohort of MSPs to the Scottish parliament. From recent polls, the Scottish National Party looks set for a majority of seats and of the overall vote. But we live in highly [...]
Photo credit: UK Parliament/ CC BY 3.0 by Baroness Quin Former Europe Minister and Labour MP The biggest myth about the Red Wall is that it was all about Brexit and that the Red Wall seats, which had voted Leave in the 2016 Referendum, [...]
Will there be a No Deal Brexit or a Free Trade Agreement, of some kind, by 15th October 2020? This was the date by which UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted an accord should be reached or, as he put it, Britain would simply walk away. Regaining British sovereignty? Given [...]
Photo credit: Steve Nimmons / CC BY There is a celebrated passage in Marcel Proust’s “Sodom and Gomorrah” where the narrator sums up the nature of a character, Charles Morel, who in some sense encapsulates all that is vile in the values of his milieu. Morel, we are [...]
Barry Davis / CC BY In recent weeks Michael Gove has admitted to the House of Commons that the end of the transition period could lead next year to queues of “up to 7000 HGVs in Kent” and that a system of “Kent Access Permits” would be necessary [...]
Northern Ireland will mark 100 years of its existence on the 3rd of May 2021. Meantime the Government of the Republic has launched a radical new policy calling for “A Shared Island”. This new emphasis on SHARING points to a United Ireland as an aspiration rather than a policy. In [...]
With the deadline for a deal being reached now centring around the 15th October European Council meeting, there are some signs of greater willingness to compromise on the two major issues of fishing rights and state aid. If that is so it may also pave the way to making progress [...]
Photo credit: European Investment Bank Authors: Sir Brian Unwin, former President of the European Investment Bank (1993 – 2000) Professor Iain Begg, Academic co-Director of the Dahrendorf Forum at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Professor at the LSE’s European Institute [...]
