Politics

So far, the debate over what happens to UK-EU trade after Brexit has been conducted around a rather odd premise: that the EU will be out to punish Britain by cutting us off unless we sign up for continued membership of the single market, with free movement of people and contributions to the EU budget. Certainly, this is the impression which many EU leaders have been keen to create, and one which the ‘Remain’ lobby is more than happy to promulgate. Yet it sits rather uneasily with reality. As the Leave campaign consistently pointed out before the referendum, the EU would be mad to start a trade war because the

‘Downing Street says the PM is set to rebuff calls for a flexible Brexit, which would allow parts of the UK to have their own arrangement,’ said the BBC radio news this morning. Not quite. This notion has been rejected in Europe, where the idea of doing some kind of separate deal with Scotland or any constituent part of the UK was never a deal. The ‘options’ that the SNP talk about do not exist as far as the EU is concerned: it is a giant bluff. It’s far from clear why she is asking Theresa May for something that the EU has already rejected.  Even if Theresa May backed

Since Nigel Farage’s latest resignation as Ukip leader, it has become clear that he is the only person who can hold the party together. Without him, Ukip has become a seemingly endless brawl between various hostile factions. Still, this leaderless mess has more supporters than the Liberal Democrats. That’s because Ukip, for all its flaws, has given a voice to those ignored in an overly centrist political debate — first Eurosceptic Tories, then working-class Labour voters. With decent leadership, Ukip could still do to the Labour party in the north of England what the SNP has done to it in Scotland. Steven Woolfe might have been able to supply that

Will Mark Carney go or stay? On appointment in 2013, he indicated he would leave the Bank of England and return to Canada in 2018 (‘We’ll be back in five,’ his wife tweeted), but he has an option to stay a further three years. Theresa May’s criticism of QE in her conference speech was interpreted as an attack, but she and Philip Hammond have subsequently been described as ‘supportive’. Admirers say continuity would be a good thing through the pre-Brexit period, especially if inflation picks up, while detractors such as Nigel Lawson (‘He’s behaved disgracefully’) long to see the back of him. But there’s no big vacancy for him to

The French are trying to seduce the British to come and work in Paris. A video hymns the delights of La Defense, the Gallic Canary Wharf. It is a healthy Brexit effect that the French now feel that they can no longer fight the City of London solely by trying to regulate it, and must try persuasion instead. The prospect of British departure reawakens the spirit of competition in a continent which had largely replaced it with bureaucracy. By leaving, Britain ought to win first-mover advantage in this contest, but even if we don’t, we will have done a service to our neighbours which we could never have managed if

During the EU referendum, there was a fierce contest between Vote Leave and Grassroots Out over which would win the official designation to campaign for Out. In the end, it went to Vote Leave — after it was decided that they held the widest cross-party support. Part of the issue was that the majority of eurosceptic Conservative MPs backed Vote Leave. This was down — in part — to an unhelpful interview, Grassroots Out’s Arron Banks gave to the Times. The Ukip donor struck a low note when he accused David Cameron of using his late disabled son Ivan as a prop over NHS policy. At the time, the comments were