Last Friday saw a potentially significant piece of Brexit news with the joint statement of the first meeting in its current format of political leaders from the UK, EU, Spain and Gibraltar, which reported that “significant progress” had been made towards achieving an agreement about the post-Brexit arrangements for Gibraltar. This was followed by widespread media reports that such an agreement was very close, and “within kissing distance” in the words of Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo. An agreement about Gibraltar was described in the Financial Times (£) as “the last big unresolve ..read more

It’s fair to say that Brexit has ceased to provide much in the way of drama. To use a cricketing analogy (and they are always the best ones), it is as if Brexit’s Bazball days have given way to the cricket of an earlier era, so that what we are now seeing is akin to Geoff Boycott (who, it’s relevant to say in this context, is both a keen Brexiter and Theresa May’s childhood hero) grinding out a painfully slow innings on a dead wicket. Such play as there is gets constantly interrupted by rain. The crowd got bored long ago, and are huddled down under macs and umbrellas. The captain, though ..read more

Although not the commonest of the taunts aimed at remainers at the time of the referendum, a recurring one was ‘don’t you think this country is capable of running its own affairs?” The obvious answer was that it was based on the false premise that the EU ran the country, and that EU membership was one way in which the country ran its own affairs capably. Nearly eight years on, it’s increasingly tempting to think that the answer to the question should simply be ‘no’. Of course, that is partly because of the particularly useless, almost absent, government we are currently enduring. It’s a gover ..read more

Lee Anderson’s decision this week to join the Reform Party, becoming its first, if unelected, MP brought into focus several of the Brexit themes I’ve been writing about in recent months. At the beginning of October, discussing the ways that Brexit has driven the Tory Party mad, I made specific reference to Anderson, then the Deputy Chairman, as illustrating how there are no discernible differences between many sections of the Tory Party and Reform. So, given the prompt of losing the Tory whip, it was an obvious move for him to make. It’s possible that other Tory MPs will follow him to Reform w ..read more

Writing this weekly blog creates a certain rhythm, though the nature of it has changed over the years. In fact, in the early years it wasn’t always weekly, as I often wrote several short posts in some weeks. But it gradually settled into a weekly pattern of posting on a Friday morning, not necessarily rounding-up the week’s events but certainly based around them. As that happened, the length of posts also settled to being about 2000-3000 words each week. Occasionally they become even longer, but I try to keep to a 3000-word ceiling although it is often difficult to do so, and sometimes impossi ..read more

One of the more ‘highbrow’ arguments for Brexit – these things are, of course, relative – was that, having left, politicians would no longer be able to blame the EU and would have to take responsibility themselves. Needless to say, this has proved as illusory in practice as it was improbable in theory. Even leaving aside all those they blame for the failures of Brexit itself, the politicians who brought us Brexit have never ceased to blame others for all the country’s woes. That has been glaringly obvious in the last week. Ever since the her disastrous mini-budget, Liz Truss and her allies ha ..read more

Shortly after last week’s post about Brexit, Russia, and defence went up, the news of Alexei Navalny’s death was announced, and although its cause is still shrouded in secrecy it can hardly be regarded as an accident, if only because of the brutal regime obtaining at the ‘Polar Wolf’ penal colony where he was incarcerated. It was a further reminder of the nature of Putin’s regime, and the anniversary, tomorrow, of its unprovoked attack on Ukraine will provide another. That is even without considering the crazy threats last weekend from Russia’s former President and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev t ..read more

In the Brexit debate, discussion of its geo-political damage has often been the poor relation of that of its economic damage. It’s easy to understand why, as the economic damage is more tangible and, to a degree, more quantifiable. The latest evidence of that came this week in a new analysis by Goldman Sachs, the significance of which is that, for the first time, it drew together all of the different counterfactual models, with the headline finding being that that UK GDP is now 5% lower than it would have been without Brexit. However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more impo ..read more

Bemused by the ‘mysterious silence’ of the government about the benefits of Brexit, last weekend former Trade Secretary Peter Lilley bemoaned (£) that “the consequence of that silence is that the narrative about Brexit is being written by its opponents”. The mystery is easily solved: the benefits of Brexit are effectively non-existent and the failure of its promises is self-evident. And the formidable attempts by Brexiters to proclaim a narrative of success have foundered not because its opponents’ voices are louder but because the public, without much leadership but seeing the evidence accumu ..read more

When I was a teenager, after much saving up from my ‘Saturday job’ money, I bought my first ever stereo device, a portable radio cassette player (younger readers may need to consult a dictionary). Not only did it have – gulp! – two speakers, but a whole array of controls, lights, and little graphs printed on it, as if precisely measuring all sorts of important sound variables. It was my pride and joy until I showed it to my brother-in-law, a marketing manager, who took one look at it, laughed, and said “that’s what we call a mug’s eyeful”. I had never heard the expression, but he explained it ..read more