In this video conversation, Dr Michael Lloyd of Global Policy Institute and our Director Brendan Donnelly discuss how, when and whether the UK will rejoin the EU. Michael advocates first joining the European Economic Area as a possible first step towards rejoining the European Union, while Brendan argues that it [...]
In this new video, our director Brendan Donnelly discusses why Brexit cannot be made to “work” without considerable accompanying political and economic drawbacks. He argues that those who wish for the UK to rejoin the EU should start making the intellectual for this now: Click here to read [...]
by David Quinn Former international civil servant One of the assumptions underlying the Brexiteers approach to Brexit has been the firm conviction that the UK, the world’s 5th largest economy, would have no difficulty in imposing a trade deal on the EU which would permit the country to maintain [...]
Political slogans, by their nature, often tend to over-simplify or even deceive. This tendency is presumably eternal and certainly preceded the Brexit experience. However, the insistence on certain questionable mantras has been exceptionally prominent to the project of removing the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). They have [...]
News that the Brexit talks were to be resumed sent the external value of the pound back up again. Political commentators, especially in the UK, began to predict the relatively rapid conclusion of an agreement on future trade relations between the UK and the EU. They pointed in particular to [...]
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 [...]
