Brexit

It is possible that Mark Carney is not quite the last person to notice that the post-Brexit economy is positively booming. Jean-Claude Junker might be too busy working out new ways to ‘punish’ Britain to have paid attention to the statistics. Gina Miller is possibly working on some bizarre High Court action to keep us in the EU. There might even be a leader writer somewhere at the FT who is still worrying away about the collapse of the economy. But just about everyone else has woken up to the fact that ever since we voted to leave the EU, the British economy, far from falling off a cliff, seems

Peers can continue their Brexit debate in relative peace today without the watchful glare of the Prime Minister gazing over them. Theresa May’s brief appearance at the start of the Lords’ Article 50 debate yesterday was unprecedented but given how long she stayed you’d be forgiven for thinking it was little more than a publicity stunt. For the Sun, however, the PM’s decision to swap chambers in Parliament did send out an important message. Those ‘unelected members still struggling with the concept of a democratic mandate’ should remember that the PM had ‘most of the public and a vast Commons majority behind her’ as she sat on the steps of

The brass neck of Tony Blair. The Brexit vote was ‘based on imperfect knowledge’, says the man who unleashed barbarism across the Middle East on the basis of a student dissertation he printed off the internet. Who marched thousands into unimaginable horror on the basis of myth and spin. That NHS claim on the side of the Leave bus is small fry, infinitesimally small fry, in comparison with the guff this bloke came out with. It didn’t cause anyone to die, for one. For Blair to lecture the British people about truth is an affront to memory and decency and reason. No self-respecting citizen should put up with it. Blair

I want to be explicit. Yes, the British people voted to leave Europe. And I agree the will of the people should prevail. I accept right now there is no widespread appetite to re-think. But the people voted without knowledge of the terms of Brexit. As these terms become clear, it is their right to change their mind. Our mission is to persuade them to do so. What was unfortunately only dim in our sight before the referendum is now in plain sight. The road we’re going down is not simply Hard Brexit. It is Brexit At Any Cost. Our challenge is to expose relentlessly what this cost is, to show how the decision

The increasingly radical Catalonian independence project has been dealt its latest blow this week: on Tuesday, Spain’s constitutional court ruled that a projected September referendum on secession would be illegal. This means any plebiscite is effectively banned. But whether Catalonia’s pro-independence president Carles Puigdemont goes ahead anyway remains to be seen. A similarly defiant course of action was pursued by his predecessor Artur Mas, who held a vote in 2014 (in which eighty per cent of people backed independence), and is currently on trial. The latest setback in the quest for Catalonian secessionism is particularly ill-timed. Just last month, Puigdemont and his Vice President Oriol Junqueras addressed MEPs in Brussels in a bid to

James Duddridge is not wrong. The Tory MP for Rochford and Southend East, who has put down a ‘no confidence’ motion in Mr Speaker Bercow, says John Bercow has abused ‘his employment contract’ by his openly political remarks. The last straw was telling students at the University of Reading that he voted Remain in last year’s European referendum. Duddridge is a fiercely outspoken Leaver, but his complaint is that the Speaker should not have revealed any preference at all. Few should contest this. Anger over the Reading revelation builds on a history of complaint: the most recent example is still fresh. It was wrong to create the news story that