Politics

It is difficult not to be Eurosceptic. The euro is in trouble, Greece has been bankrupted by Angela Merkel’s fiscal rules, and the Schengen agreement on open borders is collapsing as economic migration seems impossible to stop. Genuine refugees are sadly lost in the human tide of misery landing on the shores of Greece and Italy. And the democratic deficit which allows the European Union to be so unaccountable is leading to the rise of extreme nationalist political parties all over Europe. The result – Bulgaria has a lamentable justice system, Poland has introduced illiberal media laws and Hungary’s constitution has been hijacked. The EU is in danger of collapse unless it undertakes serious

The first of the BBC’s series of prime-time EU referendum events took place this evening, with Andrew Neil interviewing Hilary Benn. The programme highlighted both the uneasy relationship between Benn and his leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Remain campaign’s difficulty in dealing with the immigration issue. Andrew Neil began by putting to Hilary Benn a very Eurosceptic quote from Jeremy Corbyn about the EU from the Maastricht debate of the 1990s and asking Benn what Corbyn got wrong. To which Benn replied, rather uncomfortably, that the ‘Jeremy of today’ supports Britain staying in the EU. The Benn / Corbyn tensions were a feature of the interview as the shadow foreign

After the recent local elections, John McDonnell put Labour’s ‘better-than-expected’ results in part down to the efforts of Momentum activists. Alas, it seems that not everyone involved with the hard-left campaign group is so in chime with the party when it comes to Labour values. Mr S understands that Momentum’s Marlene Ellis has been suspended by the party over an open letter to Corbyn from the Momentum Black ConneXions group. Ellis — who previously made the news after she was accused of labelling Chuka Umunna as not ‘politically black‘ — co-signed the blog post which calls on Corbyn to reverse the ‘unjustified suspension of Ken Livingstone’ after the former mayor was suspended over his

Leaving the EU should boost pay and create more jobs. Spending our own money on our own priorities ensures that is true from the first post Brexit budget onwards. The dreary gloomy predictions of Remain are all based on the absurd idea that the rest of the EU will want to impose new barriers on their trade with us, and will be able to do so. As we are more the customer than the supplier and as we and they live under World Trade Organisation rules this is pure fantasy. There is one feature of the Treasury’s ludicrous forecasts for 2030 that I agree with. They reckon the UK will

It was Michael Gove’s turn in the Sky hot-seat tonight and he came determined to make the democratic case for Brexit. In the initial exchanges, Faisal Islam went after Gove hard on the question of how many economists, international institutions and countries back Britain leaving the EU. Islam pushed Gove to name 11 economists who back Brexit, Gove declined to do so. Islam then asked Gove why the British public should trust him, to which Gove replied that he was asking the British public to trust themselves. But the bigger challenge for Gove was always going to be dealing with the audience questions, which he is far less used to

‘No one can seriously deny that European integration brought an end to Franco-German conflict and has settled the German question for good,’ wrote Niall Ferguson in the latest Sunday Times. I hesitate when confronted by such an assertion by such a learned professor. But I think I would seriously deny it, or at least seriously question it. Surely what brought an end to Franco-German conflict was the utter defeat of Nazi Germany. European integration was a symptom of that end, not its cause. As for settling the German question, isn’t it too early to say? The eurozone is the first large non-German area to have been dominated by Germany since