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 [...]
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 [...]
Photo credit: Albert Bridge (Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 2.0) The Brexit project entails much collateral damage. The most prominent potential victim of UK departure from the EU to date – though others will no doubt become increasingly difficult to ignore – has been the island of Ireland. [...]
President Clinton admonished us that it was “the economy, stupid”. Perhaps, in the current febrile situation this should be amended to being “it’s the politics, stupid”. Faced with a 25% drop in GDP in the UK in quarter 2, this might seem surprising to some. But take a closer look. [...]
That the UK’s union of four nations is under strain is not new to anyone who has been paying attention. But the combined impacts of Brexit, Covid-19 and the Conservative government under Boris Johnson are driving an increasing wedge between Scotland and the rest of the UK – or, more [...]
No version of Brexit avoids disruption for Northern Ireland and the peace process. Furthermore, it is inherent in the logic of UK departure from the European Union that, far from seeking to minimise this impact, it should augment the risks to the region. The concept of sovereignty – however defined [...]
by Dr Andrew BlickReader in Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London; Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust 20th May 2020 Prior to the referendum of 23 June 2016, little attention was given at UK level to its possible implications for Northern Ireland. But in the wake of the [...]
by Dr Kirsty HughesDirector, Scottish Centre on European Relations 12th February 2019 Brexit day has come and gone. There were Saltires, EU flags and crowds at the Scottish parliament. But while everything changed as the UK left the EU, is it, for now, the case that nothing has changed in [...]
by Dr Andrew BlickReader in Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London; Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust 22nd January 2020 In February 2018, when serving as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson was reported telling journalists that ‘the particular problems around the Irish border are being used to drive the [...]
By Dr Andrew Blick, Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History, King’s College London; and Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust This article was first published on The Conversation. As the new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan will gain command of a budget worth £17 billion to be spent mainly [...]
