Despite the huffing of ideologues, the world has moved on. Voters and businesses are calling for more effective protections As the sewage-filled waters start to close over the heads of Torydom, their Tufton Street thinktankers carry on like the orchestra on the Titanic. In three grand Westminster houses dwell the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the anti-migration Migration Watch UK, the climate crisis-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, the anti-EU European Foundation, the Margaret Thatcher-founded Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) and others, all very opaque about ..read more

Brexit and Scottish independence have benefited Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousaf – now both are suffering the consequences Brexit isn’t working, and there are potholes everywhere. Those are not equivalent challenges. Fresh asphalt heals cracked carriageways in an afternoon. Repairing a fractured continental alliance is the work of a generation. One problem did not cause the other. But they are on the vast continuum of political failure – from global to local – that coincides with 14 years of Conservative rule and for which the party will be punished in local elections on Thursday. Also this week n ..read more

The London mayor, running for his third term in office, had been warning of a ‘two-horse race’ When Hilary Cass published her review of gender identity services for children, saying medical evidence did not generally justify giving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children, she said the “toxity of the debate” around trans children was exceptional, and she said she would like to see the issue discussed in a less polarised way. But that has not stopped her report becoming a political football. The UK government responded to it with a ministerial statement treating it as a landmark vict ..read more

Businesses say fees for Dover inspections are much higher than first thought and will push up shop prices Importers of food from the EU into Britain have said newly introduced post-Brexit checks could increase their costs by up to 60%, pushing up prices for customers and driving some shops out of business. After five previous delays, the UK government on Tuesday introduced the physical checks on animal and plant products entering from the EU, having revealed at the start of this month that it would be implementing a common user charge (CUC) of up to £145 per consignment ..read more

Second phase of physical checks could result in price increases in shops, as businesses pass on costs to consumers After more than three years of delays, Tuesday finally sees the introduction of physical checks on animal and plant imports coming into Britain from the EU. Importers and trade associations have warned that the new bureaucracy could heap significant costs on to importers, resulting in increases to prices on shop shelves ..read more

Dublin records near-doubling of tax revenue from duties on imports of clothing, food and other goods from Great Britain Ireland has landed a €700m (£600m) Brexit bonanza with a steep increase in tax revenues flowing from customs duties now applicable to imports of clothing, food and other goods from Great Britain. Before Brexit, Britain enjoyed customs-free exports to Ireland and the rest of the EU because it was part of the single market and customs union ..read more

Starmer wants to make Tory policy on the economy a central theme of its election campaign … without mentioning Brexit Now, let me get this straight. We have a fissiparous, Brexit-supporting government, many of whose MPs are stepping down, convinced that their party is heading for its wilderness years. Correspondingly, we have a Labour opposition that is riding high in the polls, led by Keir Starmer, who – unlike his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn – played a noble part in the remain campaign and argued passionately for a second referendum. Proponents of a second referendum hoped that the country wou ..read more

Such policies are ‘betrayal’ of values, says French president in speech covering defence and negative effects of Brexit Emmanuel Macron has criticised migration policies that involve sending people to African countries as “a betrayal of our [European] values”, just days after the UK government passed its Rwanda deportation bill. The French president made the remarks in a wide-ranging speech on Thursday aimed at warning Europe against overdependence on other countries for security and trade ..read more

As David Cameron learned to his cost over Brexit, voters don’t judge politicians on policy, they judge on results Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome The government’s current position on the Rwanda scheme is unlikely to boost its electoral hopes – and to understand why, we should look to David Cameron and a particular pre-Brexit failure. Cast your mind back to the moment the former Tory prime minister’s renegotiated deal for our EU membership “exploded on the launchpad” ahead of the referendum. He and his team had worked very, very hard. While they hadn’t got what they had set ou ..read more

A scheme to allow British under-30s to live and work in the EU has been flatly rejected. Why punish them for older voters’ mistakes? Only those born before 1998 could vote on Brexit, so there is no conceivable way of knowing which way today’s 18- to 30-year-olds would have felt about it. Oh, except there is: 70% of 18- to 24-year-olds think leaving the EU was a bad idea. Of the 25- to 49-year-olds, 66% also think we were wrong to leave. If you can bear to drag your mind back to the immediate aftermath of Brexit, you’ll recall that words like “overwhelming” and “vast” were completely debased by ..read more