Politics

Back in the summer of 2015, a year before the Brexit vote, I was summoned to the German Embassy in London for a special briefing by a senior member of Germany’s Social Democrats. The man from the SPD didn’t mince his words: David Cameron might secure a few small concessions in his forthcoming renegotiation with the EU, but it was inconceivable that he could obtain any significant changes in Britain’s relationship with Europe. For Germany, free movement of people within the European Union was sacrosanct – and even if Deutschland had been willing to change the rules for Britain’s sake, any major alteration would need to be ratified by all

At the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the queues started at 2 a.m. on Christmas night. In Wrexham, people started lining up at three, getting ready for a six o’clock start. In Edinburgh, hardy shoppers braved flurries of morning snow to make sure they were first in line for Boxing Day bargains. Whatever else is happening at the close of this year, British shoppers are as indefatigable as ever in their determination to keep spending. Surely it wasn’t meant to be like this? In the wake of the vote to leave the EU back in June, mainstream economists were unanimous in their view that we would be in a recession

Every year closes with ‘fury’ as the press reacts to yet another honour for a ‘mandarin’ who has been doing something they disagree with, and 2016 is no exception. This year’s villainous recipient of a gong is Sir Mark Lowcock, Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development. Much of the anger directed as Lowcock’s gong is really frustration with the government’s policy on aid spending, which is that 0.7 per cent of national income is spent on development projects around the world every year. That’s not Lowcock’s decision, but something that the Coalition Government introduced and that this majority Conservative Government under David Cameron and then Theresa May has remained committed

Another day, another Tudor throwback. This time, Jeremy Corbyn has accused Theresa May of acting like Henry VIII by avoiding a vote in Parliament over the triggering of Article 50. ‘She cannot hide behind Henry VIII and the divine rights of the power of kings on this one’, he told the Guardian this week. ‘The idea that on something as major as this the prime minister would use the royal prerogative to bypass parliament is extraordinary – I don’t know where she’s coming from.’ We’ve been here before. Our politicians are addicted to Tudor comparisons: only last August, the Labour MP Barry Gardiner accused Theresa May of seeking ‘to diminish

Unencumbered Sir: Matthew Parris’s bizarre reference (‘Unforgiven’, 10 December) to the UK economy as merely ‘medium-sized’ is a classic instance of Remainers’ tendency to pass Britain off expediently as a vulnerable country on the margins of Europe, which couldn’t survive without our EU umbilical cord. The UK is actually the fifth or sixth largest of the world’s nearly 200 national economies. If we are only medium-sized, how can all the world’s ‘even smaller’ economies — such as India, Canada, South Korea or Australia — possibly hack it as independent sovereign states outside any supranational governance bloc like the EU? How have they managed so far? Mr Parris does at least

Just what is it about the proposal to require voters to show ID that so frightens the Labour party? Funny, but this was the party which, during 13 years in power, hugely added to the surveillance state; which passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, leading to councils snooping on our wheelie bins and, in one famous case, to Poole Council spying on a couple wrongly suspected of faking their address in order to get their child into a better school. It is the party which empowered agencies of the state to retain information on our emails and phone calls, which was happy to see our streets plastered with CCTV

During the EU referendum, the Sun ran a front page with the headline ‘the Queen backs Brexit’. The paper reported that the Queen clashed with Nick Clegg, who was then Deputy Prime Minister, over Europe at a lunch in 2011 — at which she declared the EU was ‘heading in the wrong direction’. In the days and weeks that followed, the paper received much flak over the legitimacy of the story, with blame being pointed in Michael Gove’s direction. In fact, Clegg later used an interview with the BBC to pour scorn on the story: ‘I mean, the idea that the Queen of all people would even bother to give someone as insignificant as

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7: Matthew Parris’s article, written two weeks before the referendum, in which he called on Spectator readers to vote ‘Remain’ Like almost everyone, I’ve piled angrily into this fight. But as the debate nears resolution I feel ashamed of all my furious certainties. In the end, none of us knows, and we shouldn’t pretend to. So I’ll try now to express more temperately six thoughts that persist as the early rage subsides. From the first three you’ll see that I’m beginning to understand that for many the EU is now a whipping boy. ‘Europe’ has become