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Brexit

Friday

Richard Tol

How will Brexit Britain cut emissions – and keep the lights on?

Many remarkable things happened immediately after the Brexit referendum. One is often overlooked: The House of Commons adopted the Fifth Carbon Budget, reaffirming the targets of the Climate Change Act 2008. More than half of the greenhouse gas emission reduction in the UK is due to policies and measures that originate in Brussels rather than in London. In 2014, one quarter of UK emission reductions were achieved by paying companies in Eastern Europe to reduce theirs instead. Brexit will have a profound effect on three central planks of UK climate policy – nuclear power, interconnection, and permit trade – but the government pretends that nothing will change. When he was

Thursday

Taki

High life | 2 November 2017

I have a message for the London mayor, Sadiq Khan: you and your policies stink! While the fuzz are busy scanning the internet for racist or sexist material, crime in the capital is up by six per cent over the past 12 months and the police — handicapped by PC orders from above — have made 20 per cent fewer arrests. Statistics show youth violence and murder soaring in London, with the latter up by 84 per cent on last year. But here’s a story that’s not a statistic. Last week, my little girl Lolly was viciously attacked and robbed near the World’s End pub on the King’s Road after

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The EU helped bring peace to Ireland. Will violence now return?

The 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg is as good week as any to examine the power of sectarianism. Here in Britain we do not need to look far. Northern Ireland ought to be in crisis because a hard Brexit will wreck its economy. The Republic exported €18bn-worth of services to the UK in 2014, and €11.4bn went back. In 2015, it exported €15.6bn of goods. Britain exported €18bn in return. Meanwhile millions from both countries crossed borders we fondly thought were now just lines on the map to see the sights as holidaymakers, or visit their friends,

Helen R Brown

A cold coming to Cornwall

In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge her passion for abstract form. But her commitment deepened. The solid ovoids she sculpted carried the weight of grief and the hope of eggs. To Hepworth, they became ‘forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’. They were a means of retaining freedom whilst carrying out what was demanded of me as a human being… a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic ‘will to live’ as opposed to the extrinsic disaster of the world war. References to Hepworth roll all the way through Ali Smith’s new novel,

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

If the City can’t replace 75,000 jobs, it has bigger problems than Brexit

The wine bars will be spookily empty. The lap-dancing clubs will be abandoned, and Savills will have to start working out how to sell mansions within an hour’s commute of Frankfurt and Paris instead of London. Just about every day brings another dire prediction about the impact of leaving the EU on the City’s mighty financial services industry. Only this week the Bank of England, which has turned itself into a semi-official  chorus of doom on the issue, joined the fun, with reports that it was predicting 75,000 job losses. No one denies that would be serious. The City is one of the most dynamic parts of the British economy,

Monday

Camilla Swift

The value of Scotch whisky exports might be on the up – but volume isn’t

Scotland’s whisky industry is the UK’s single largest food and drink export, accounting for almost a fifth of Britain’s the sector’s exports. It’s also the number one internationally traded spirit in the world, and changes in the market can, therefore, cause something of a stir in the UK exports market. That’s why today’s statistics from the Scotch Whisky association are worth taking a look at. In the first half of 2017, Scotch whisky exports grew in value by 3.4% to £1.8billion – showing that despite the many new arrivals on the whisky market, Scotch continues to hold its own. Single Malts in particular have seen their popularity increase drastically. Over

Sunday

Steerpike

Labour MP: ‘Better educated’ people voted Remain

After the Conservative MP Chris Heaton-Harris was outed last week for writing to universities requesting details of their Brexit syllabus, the debate on academic Brexit bias is in full swing. Happily Labour’s Barry Sheerman was on hand to clear the matter up with an appearance on Yorkshire Sunday Politics. Sheerman said any anti-Brexit sentiment at universities was down to the fact that ‘better educated people’ back Remain: BS: The truth is that when you look at who voted to Remain, most of them were the better educated people in our country… TI: This is controversial! Massively controversial. BS: Absolutely! It’s absolutely true. You can actually see the pattern. All the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Economic forecasts are almost always wrong – so why do we take them seriously?

There is a weird psychology behind economic forecasts. We know they are going to be wrong, because they always are. Yet such is our appetite for information – any information – that nevertheless we can’t stop ourselves taking them seriously. The Sunday Times this morning has gone big on a report by serial doomsayers the EY Item Club claiming that the government needs to move quickly to obtain a transitional deal on Brexit or face a collapse in business investment. Even with a deal it predicts that the growth in business investment next year will fall to 1.5 per cent, from 2.1 per cent this year. Maybe. But then again,

Saturday

James Landale

The EU needs to ask itself some searching questions about Brexit

I have come to Greece in search of sanity over Brexit. Ostensibly it is a symposium to discuss relations between Britain and Greece. But it is also an excuse to step away from the minutiae of the negotiations to think about the future of Europe. It was from Greece, of course, that our continent derived its name — from the mythological Europa who was ravished by Zeus and bore a future king of Crete. One contributor notes dryly that Greece is also not a bad place to think about the rise and fall of empires, the follies of politicians, the failings of institutions and what happens to elites when they

Philip Sime

European press on Catalonia: “Suddenly, Brexit doesn’t seem so bad”

“Look on the bright side…Brexit no longer seems so serious” Chappatte in Le Temps, Switzerland The events in Catalonia dominate Europe’s press this morning, seen as the biggest political crisis to hit the country since the attempted coup d’état of 1981. The Madrid-based El País says the invocation of Article 155 was done so ‘legally and transparently’ and does not constitute an act of aggression against Catalan self-government or the rights of Catalans. Rather, El País views Madrid’s response to the crisis as ‘legitimate and necessary’ in the face of the challenge posed by Catalonia’s ‘irresponsible and reckless’ political leaders. It calls a ‘quick, legal and legitimate’ return to self-government

Friday

James Forsyth

Will Britain back Madrid for the sake of Brexit?

Theresa May’s official spokesperson has just issued a statement on Catalonia’s declaration of independence that will please Madrid. It makes clear that the ‘UK does not and will not recognise the Unilateral Declaration of Independence’. It says that the declaration is ‘based on a vote declared illegal by the Spanish courts’. It concludes by saying that ‘we want to see the rule of law upheld, the Spanish constitution respected, and Spanish unity preserved’. What is telling about this statement is that it doesn’t even included the kind of diplomatically phrased call for restraint that Donald Tusk’s tweet did. Now, you can say that the UK statement is not that dissimilar to

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 26 October 2017

Meeting halfway Sir: If our Brexit negotiator David Davis has not read Robert Tombs’s wonderful article ‘Lost in translation’ (21 October) on how different the French and the British can be when it comes to the negotiating table, he really should, as it splendidly exemplifies how useful history can be. The trouble is, of course, that politicians are often too busy to read history, or that historians get round to writing something useful too late to exert practical influence. In this instance, however, there is still time: manufactured deadlines can be adjusted, and (given adequate cross-cultural empathy) accommodations can be reached. Brian Harrison Oxford The law in France Sir: Robert

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 26 October 2017

Theresa May’s style of negotiating with the European Union is coming spookily to resemble David Cameron’s. She is in the mindset where the important thing is to get a deal, rather than working out what sort of a deal is worth getting. The EU understands this, and therefore delays, making Cameron/May more desperate to settle, even on bad terms. Eventually, there is an inadequate deal which the British government then has to sell to a doubting electorate. Mr Cameron was punished for this at the referendum he had called. Mrs May is inviting punishment at a general election. It is interesting how moderate politics cannot get a hearing just now.

Hans-Olaf Henkel

The EU must open trade talks with the UK

Let me make it clear at the outset: I was against Brexit. However, I am appalled by the reaction to the referendum of the Europhiles in Brussels and elsewhere in the EU. Instead of taking the right lesson from Brexit, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and French President Emmanuel Macron used it to promote their project of a United States of Europe. The European Parliament’s Brexit spokesman Guy Verhofstadt displayed an unacceptable arrogance towards the British voters during the recent Brexit debate in Strasbourg and EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier continues to give the impression that he is out to punish them. Instead of developing a timetable for the negotiations together

James Landale

Greece Notebook | 26 October 2017

I have come to Greece in search of sanity over Brexit. Ostensibly it is a symposium to discuss relations between Britain and Greece. But it is also an excuse to step away from the minutiae of the negotiations to think about the future of Europe. It was from Greece, of course, that our continent derived its name — from the mythological Europa who was ravished by Zeus and bore a future king of Crete. One contributor notes dryly that Greece is also not a bad place to think about the rise and fall of empires, the follies of politicians, the failings of institutions and what happens to elites when they

James Forsyth James Forsyth

MPs are undermining Britain’s world-class university system

The debate about universities in the last few days has been extremely frustrating. Britain has the two best universities in the world, according to The Times Higher Education rankings, and five of the top 25. This should be a cause for national celebration. Politicians should be seeking to build on this strength, not doing anything to undermine it. But instead, MPs on both the left and the right are behaving in reckless and irresponsible ways. Oxford is the best university in the world. But a former universities minister, David Lammy, the shadow Education Secretary, the Tory chair of the Education Select Committee and 100-odd other MPs want to massively interfere

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hammond can build his way out of trouble

Sometimes in life the biggest risk you can take is to play it safe. This is the predicament of Philip Hammond as he approaches the Budget next month. If he adopts a safety-first approach, it will almost certainly go wrong and he’ll be forced into a credibility-draining U-turn, as he was in March. His best hope is to be bold, and to hope this generates enough momentum to carry him over any bumps in the road. The two longest-serving chancellors of recent times have relished the theatrics of Budget Day. Both Gordon Brown and George Osborne loved pulling a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute, wrongfooting the

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

The eurosceptic right are copying the SNP’s sinister playbook

If democracy is government by the people and meritocracy by the most able, Brexitocracy is rule by charlatans. Anyone who doubts that should survey the limp justifications, weaker than the Labour vetting process, for Chris Heaton-Harris’s letter to vice-chancellors. The Eurosceptic MP wrote to universities and asked if they wouldn’t mind drawing up a list of names for him. Nothing fancy, just everyone involved in teaching about Brexit and copies of their teaching materials. Now, the normal procedure when an MP – a government whip no less – does something completely deranged and massively embarrassing is to cordon them off with yellow hazard tape and hose down the crime scene. Instead, Andrea Leadsom —

Tuesday

Philip Sime

The Czech Republic could be the next country to leave the EU

In the immediate aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the EU, there were fears in the corridors of Brussels that it would trigger a so-called ‘domino effect’. Many predicted that other Eurosceptic nations would follow Britain’s lead, unravelling the European project which took 65 years to build. More than one year after the Brexit vote, spirits in Brussels are relatively high. The popular European federalist, Guy Verhofstadt, is even hailing a ‘reverse domino-effect’. However, over the weekend, a little-noticed political earthquake struck the Czech Republic as Andrej Babiš, a Trump-style populist billionaire, led his ‘Action for Dissatisfied Citizens’ party to victory in the country’s legislative election. The 63-year-old tycoon, who

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Ceci n’est pas une no deal, says Macron

This post is from tonight’s Evening Blend email, a free round-up and analysis of the day’s politics. Sign up here. Is the government really changing its policy on planning for a no deal? That question isn’t simple to answer, not least because it’s not entirely clear what the government’s policy is on this matter: Philip Hammond has said the government won’t spend the necessary money until it needs to, while Theresa May says whatever money needs to be spent will be spent. But the pressure has been rising from Brexiteers for ministers to make real plans and produce real money to ensure that those plans are implemented. This isn’t just