THE first rule of Fight Club is: you don’t talk about Fight Club. In politics, it’s about not declaring cynical ulterior motives. That rule just got broken. The idea has been floated about turning the next general election into a ‘Super Thursday’ double poll by bolting on a referendum about whether or not to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). More precisely, it would be about quitting the treaty and replacing the arrangement with something else, possibly rejoining it again after fixing the current arrangement. Because fixing it does need.  Across the years, newspap ..read more

FOUR years after Brexit, many still regard it as a mistake. Much at fault here are Conservative ministers, who rarely if ever contradict the falsely negative ‘Rejoiner’ claims. A refreshing exception is Kemi Badenoch, whose Department for Business and Trade has just published an optimistic report on where we stand. We hope that she will continue to make Brexit succeed. A surprising moment came in last week’s University Challenge on TV. Both the clever and highly knowledgeable teams seemed to think that Britain was a member of the EU, prompting presenter Amol Rajan to joke that they had missed ..read more

I WAS sent a little vignette about how the French establishment sees Brexit, or rather more accurately how they would like to portray it. Le Figaro is the establishment self-proclaimed voice of La France, their equivalent of perhaps The Times with a bit of FT thrown in – and to them the mad Rosbif have got what they deserved, ‘a total loss of control of their destiny.’ Brexit has been, they say, a shipwreck. A link to the article is here and it is translated below. In essence it describes a collapse in UK public services, impoverishment of the ..read more

THIS was a recent Telegraph headline: ‘David Cameron says Britain needs closer ties with EU’. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Lord Cameron is now gathering up the toys he threw out of his pram when the 2016 referendum went against him. What an opportunity to issue more rhetoric and platitudes about ‘our European friends and neighbours’! He must think every day is Christmas. Prior to the vote, he lived in a fantasy world of how important it was to stay in this unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable organisation, where he would create important reforms that would benefit the UK. In early 2016 I wro ..read more

BORIS Johnson. If I ever have to talk about that man again it will be too soon. This week, after revised immigration figures were released that showed net immigration in the UK for 2022 was 745,000, an ‘upgrade’ from 606,000 reported earlier in the  year (and a record 1.3million over the past two years), former Prime Minister and all-round nincompoop Johnson somehow managed to say that this was a victory for Brexit!  And these are just the net figures. As the Office for National Statistics explain here, ‘In the year ending (YE) June 2023, the provisional esti ..read more

SEVEN years after the country voted to leave the European Union and three years after it finally did so, a large group took over the central area at the Last Night of the Proms and waved EU flags while others capered outside with banners – we have so many manqué performance artists these days, and so well-organised and well-funded, it would seem. Yet we did have a vote about this. Moreover, it was binding. All major parties undertook to honour the result, even though Parliament then tried to wriggle out of it. How they disliked hearing audience members on Question Time telling them t ..read more

THERE is a long and somewhat ignoble British tradition of recently retired senior officers railing against the policies and actions they themselves implemented when serving. It’s therefore not entirely a surprise that the former Defence Secretary (who was only a lowly Captain when he left the Army) Ben Wallace has joined their ranks, berating the European Convention on Human Rights. He said such legislation was protecting terrorists.   I look forward to the release of the Cabinet minutes when he raised this issue with each of the three Prime Ministers under whom he served. I also hop ..read more

IF YOU want still to rejoin the EU, ask yourself after reading about nearly four decades of IMF economic data how in the name of good judgement anyone might want to do that.   The main Rejoin argument focuses on prosperity, claiming we were better off in than out. That is dramatically demonstrably not true, as you will see here. For those four decades the EU has been a graveyard for GDP. The world has become comparatively wealthier as the UK has year-on-year with the rest of the EU become relatively substantially poorer. The EU and eu ..read more

JUST for fun, here is a compendium of some of the wilder recent Remainer claims about the impact of Brexit from generally respected newspaper columnists. ‘Brexit has broken everything’, wrote one, and this rather sums up the childish mindset of such people. We always knew that a hardcore of Remainers would never give up. As Jacobites were still attempting to reverse the Glorious Revolution more than half a century after the event, we can expect Remainers to try to reverse Brexit for at least a few decades. Even so, the increasingly desperate attempts to pin any and all negative events on Brexi ..read more

UROPE appears to be falling apart. Germany is now officially in recession as de-industrialisation follows its green energy policies and the catastrophic damage to the Nord Stream pipelines. As Bloomberg put it last week: ‘Europe’s economic engine is breaking down’. France remains in uproar as protests continue nationwide. And any idea that that it is trying to free itself from the shackles of carbon neutrality is wishful thinking at best, naïve at worst. Dutch farmers are still under attack from their own government after the EU approved a farm buy-out plan to meet the ..read more