Politics

There is an intriguing pattern in our relationship with European integration. A Frenchman vetoed our attempt to join. A Frenchman threatens to veto our attempt to leave – or at least to leave with an agreement. General de Gaulle said we were too remote from Europe to join. Emmanuel Macron says we are too close to Europe to leave. I think de Gaulle got it right. I hope Macron doesn’t turn out to be right too, so that we end up stuck half in and half out, neither ‘at the heart of Europe’ nor ‘global Britain’. How individuals and nations react to the project of European federalism is determined not

When will London move into Tier 3 restrictions? The sense in government is that it’s no longer a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ — and that ‘when’ is imminent. Matt Hancock is expected to make an announcement this afternoon after he chaired a Covid operations committee meeting this morning to look at the data. The initial plan had been for a review of the tiers by Wednesday — but that decision has been brought forward after the capitals worrying rise in infection rate data.  When areas were placed into the new tier system a few weeks ago, there were some ministers — namely Michael Gove — who pushed for London to be placed

Currency speculators at some of the hedge funds in Mayfair may be feeling quietly pleased. Trade experts will be relieved that their lucrative consultancy gigs will keep on coming. Heck, even financial columnists can safely pontificate about the possible outcome for a while yet, while the FBPE mob on Twitter can carry on predicting the apocalypse every time Nissan adjusts its production schedules. There are a few people for whom today’s agreement between Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to carry on discussing a trade deal will come as a relief. For the wider economy, however, it is little short of a disaster. It is hard

Another Brexit deadline has come and gone. The Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Boris Johnson have just announced that the negotiations will continue despite the talk that today marked a hard stop for the negotiations. Strikingly, they haven’t set a new deadline for when the talks have to conclude suggesting that they may go on for some time yet and that the end of the transition period on 31 December is now the only deadline that really counts. The tone of the Johnson / von der Leyen joint statement is notably more upbeat than the briefing that followed their Wednesday night dinner. It calls their conversation today ‘useful’;

Brexit talks between the two sides are deadlocked. Boris Johnson’s latest bid to ‘divide and conquer’ – pledging to visit Paris and Berlin to try and talk Macron and Merkel round – looks set to fail. The EU, it seems, has stayed united on Brexit, all the way to the end. We shouldn’t be surprised.  Like it or not, this is what the country voted for in 2016. Unless something huge happened subsequently to prevent it, this is always the situation where we were likely to end up. Why? Because the EU was never going to back down on anything they perceived as a genuine threat to the single market. Brussels was also

From Monday, the guidance for self-isolation is changing. Previously if you were told by officials (or the NHS app) you had been in close contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19, you were expected to self-isolate for 14 days. Starting next week, this will be reduced to 10 days, and will also apply to those returning from ‘high risk’ travel areas that are not on the UK’s ‘green list’. The update was issued as a joint statement from the UK chief medical officers, who said: ‘after reviewing the evidence, we are now confident that we can reduce the number of days that contacts self-isolate from 14 days to 10.’

It is reported today that a company called Britishvolt will build a huge ‘gigaplant’ making electric car batteries in Blyth in Northumberland. There are huge numbers attached to this: £2.6 billion of investment, 3,000 people directly employed and another 5,000 jobs promised in the supply chain for the factory. I really hope that this stuff happens, even in part. That’s partly because I’d love to see more proof that the transition to a lower-carbon economy really can translate into tangible economic benefit. Though I’m in favour of Net Zero and decarbonisation, I do worry that the political case for them is sometimes being sold on promises of economic gain that