Brexit

Copyright often seems like a joke. Most of us infringe it constantly, and publicly, without a second’s thought. With the advent of the internet, the public uploads countless videos, music, photographs, art, and a whole host of other things without the permission of the creators. Even large organisations get away with it. A few years ago, for example, the National Trust posted a picture of an unusual, heart-shaped honeycomb to social media, claiming it had been made by bees at one of their properties. It went viral, but it wasn’t actually theirs. Luckily for them, the beekeeper who took the photograph didn’t press the issue. Even creators, whom the system

Now that Britain has left the EU, we are no longer bound by the European Court of Justice. Some may view that as something to celebrate. Yet there may also be downsides. The ECJ is the final court of the EU. It hears lots of cases about EU member states who break EU law. It then reaches conclusions which form case law. All 27 members of the EU are bound by this, but Britain, outside the EU, is not. But here’s the catch: some of those decisions might actually be good ones. The solution is that we should borrow these good ones for ourselves. English law is a magpie. We

Keir Starmer’s keynote speech at the Fabian conference today was focused almost completely on foreign policy. The thrust of the Labour pitch was that Starmer is ‘pro-American but anti-Trump’. Given Corbyn’s tendency to see the United States at the Great Satan, this marks a huge shift in Labour’s foreign policy outlook. However, the speech was also classic Starmer and not in a good way: correcting the most obvious mistakes from the Corbyn era but going absolutely no further. I should take a moment to applaud Starmer for at least pivoting Labour back to a foreign policy position that is sensible and won’t stand in the way of the party trying

Of all the arguments put out against Brexit during the bitter referendum debate, one of the least convincing was that it would give a UK government the opportunity to repeal employment law, thereby impoverishing Britain and its people. Jeremy Corbyn once asserted that a Conservative government would turn the country into a ‘low-wage tax haven’. That is an interesting concept, which like the chemical element Seaborgium might theoretically exist but which has yet to be discovered in the real world – most tax havens seem to be pretty wealthy, at least compared with similar countries which haven’t set the fiscal and regulatory conditions to attract businesses and wealthy individuals. There wouldn’t

What will Brexit Britain do differently? This is going to be the most important question in our politics for the next decade. If the answer is that nothing much will change, it would be hard to argue that the disruption of the past four and a half years has been worth it. But if Brexit means the country becomes quicker at adapting to changing circumstances, then the electorate’s decision in 2016 will have been vindicated. The quick decision to remove VAT from tampons and sanitary towels is a small, early sign of how Brexit enables parliament to respond more directly to public pressure. The decision not to join the EU’s

Rewind a few months, and it was all meant to be very different. With Covid-19 rampant across the world, the European Union would take charge of sourcing vaccines from the major drugs companies. Its massive buying and regulatory power, coupled with its finely-tuned administrative machine, would make sure its 440 million people were protected from the virus before anyone else. It would be a magnificent demonstration of the whole point of the organisation. The trouble is, not only has the project already started to come off the rails, it is getting worse with every day that passes. Europe’s vaccine alliance is crumbling with potentially far-reaching consequences. Europe’s vaccine alliance is

Every party keeps on file a list of rash things politicians in other parties have said that can be used against them at a later date. Way back when I was directing Ukip’s 2014 European parliamentary campaign, I built up a ‘helpful contributions’ folder containing print-outs of gaffes and embarrassing admissions made by pro-EU MPs and MEPs. Conservative Campaign Headquarters probably has at its disposal a far more sophisticated and comprehensive digital system for logging the own-goals of its adversaries. But one thing is certain, someone will imminently be inputting an entry marked something like ‘Duffield, R. – Labour’s plan to re-join the EU’. Because Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP

The banks would all flee. International investors would take fright. And the pound would turn into the Great British peso. We heard a lot over the last four years about how leaving the European Union would be catastrophic for the UK economy. But here is something odd. With the transitional arrangement coming to an end with the close of the old year, and with the UK now out of the Single Market and the Customs Union, and with just a loose trade arrangement with the rest of the continent that doesn’t even cover financial services, so far the FTSE is loving Brexit. True, it is only the first week of