Eu

Thursday

Peter Jones

Pericles vs Juncker

The hopelessness of the EU is well demonstrated by the current rhetoric issuing from its inner chambers: that Britain must be punished for the ‘crime’ of leaving it. What sort of message does that send out to the world, let alone other EU members, about the value that the EU places on liberality and freedom? In his funeral speech in 430 BC over those killed in the war against Sparta, Pericles hymned not so much the dead as the city of Athens itself, describing ‘the way of life that enables us to pursue our objectives, and the political institutions and national character that made our great achievements possible’. One of the central themes

Ian Katz

Victory of the swashbucklers

On 14 June, a short email popped up in the inboxes of all Financial Times editorial staff. It came from the paper’s style guru and announced tersely: ‘The out campaigners should be Brexiters, not Brexiteers.’ As usual for the FT’s style pronouncements, the memo did not lay out the reasoning behind the decision, but it followed a discussion among editors over whether the word ‘Brexiteer’ had connotations of swashbuckling adventure. Much has been said and written about the power of the Leave campaign’s simple and disciplined messaging. Both sides agree that the Remain camp never found a slogan with the clarity and muscular appeal of ‘Take Back Control’ — a

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A free vote on the Heathrow runway? Don’t be so wet, Prime Minister

Hinkley Point — for all its flaws and the whiffs of suspicion around its Chinese investors — has finally received Downing Street’s blessing. Meanwhile, ministers hold the party line that High Speed 2 will go ahead according to plan, backed by news that the project has already bought £2 billion worth of land; and investors hunt for shares in the construction sector that might benefit from the multi-billion-pound infrastructure spree widely expected in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s autumn statement. But still no decision on a new airport runway for London — the one piece of digger work, short of tunnelling under the Atlantic, that would signal Britain’s raging post-Brexit appetite for

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

The Brexit bounce continues – ten forecasters up their predictions for 2016 growth

The Brexit bounce continues. HM Treasury has today released forecasts of the economists it follows, as it does every month. Last time, there was a flurry of downgrades and forecasts of an immediate recession. Now, these forecasts are being torn up by everyone, including by the FT (although you can bet the FT won’t report on the upgrades as eagerly as it did the downgrades). The average new forecast suggests GDP will grow by 1.8 per cent this year, far better than the 1.5 per cent forecast last month. This back to where the consensus was before the Brexit vote. The OECD, which had previously predicted “immediate” uncertainty after a

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Brexit U-turns: who is rowing back on their Project Fear warnings?

In the run-up to the referendum, we were warned Brexit would unleash misery. George Osborne suggested a vote for Brexit would lead to a DIY recession. And numerous business bosses and the great and the good piled in to add their warnings to the doom-mongering. Yet in the weeks since the referendum, their predictions of chaos have not come true. What’s more, many of those shouting the loudest about the consequence of Brexit are now furiously rowing back on their warnings. Here, The Spectator compiles the Brexit u-turns and referendum backtracking: In the aftermath of the vote, many major banks and financial institutions continued to warn that Brexit spelt bad news for the

Monday

Sam White

Will Donald Trump have the last laugh?

‘I am getting nervous. But it’s not because Trump is good. It’s because people are stupid’. So said the (usually) very funny US comedian Bill Maher on TV recently. When I heard him say it, my first thought was: Trump’s going to win. Not because Maher is right, but because I recognised something from the EU referendum campaign, when the great and the good – from metropolitan comedians to overpaid columnists — piled in to suggest that Brexit backers were all dimwitted lemmings, marching zombie-like off a cliff. Pro-EU devotees, some from positions of astonishing privilege, were punching down. It wasn’t a good look, and it harmed their cause. The

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Sarkozy is sceptical about climate change? String him up

Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy has gone ‘beyond the limits of decency’. Cue an atmosphere that’s almost medieval, which basically tells Sarkozy, and by extension everyone, that you cannot say things like that. You probably shouldn’t even think them. The swiftness and ugliness of the response to Sarkozy’s comments confirm that questioning climate change is to the 21st century what

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 15 September 2016

What immigration debate? Sir: Henrik Jonsson says (Letters, 10 September) that Swedes ought to learn from the Brits how to maintain a broad and dynamic public debate. I can’t say I witnessed anything approximating public debate on the topic of immigration during the referendum, when the debate was carried out through the ballot box, not in reasonable parliamentary discussion. What we need is for more senior politicians to be willing to engage in public discourse and take a non-careerist approach. Too many leaders have thought it best to avoid this toxic issue rather than risk their positions. As Enoch Powell once described the typical politicians’ view on immigration, ‘It’s better for

The Spectator

Barometer | 15 September 2016

French intelligence Some interesting facts about the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, for the benefit of shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry. Ayrault was elected mayor of Saint-Herblain, a suburb of Nantes, in 1977 aged just 27. He went on to become mayor of the entire city. In 2012 he was appointed prime minister by incoming president François Hollande. His appointment caused a crisis in Arabic newsrooms because when pronounced properly his name sounds like Lebanese slang for penis. Ayrault resigned as prime minister in 2014 after disappointing local election results for the Socialists, but made a comeback as foreign minister in February. No visa necessary The EU threatened to force British travellers to

Sunday

Alex Massie

Liam Fox confirms that Britain now has a nationalist government

Unlike the boss, I thought Liam Fox’s comments on fat and lazy British businesses that could be exporting more but aren’t because, well, an afternoon on the golf course is more comfortable than striving for Britain were deplorable. But they were also telling. Because they were a further confirmation that the United Kingdom now has a nationalist government. The liberal Toryism of the Cameron era is gone, sunk with a whimper in record time. In its place is a Conservative nationalism that envisages SS Britannia buccaneering its way across the world’s oceans. This, after all, was the animating spirit of what we might call the Brexit campaign’s more cheerful wing. Well, it’s a nice

Saturday

Ed West

Imagine there’s no countries… and therefore no museums

I’m not a great optimist about the whole Brexit thing, although my colleagues would mostly disagree. It’s as if we were expecting a storm and we’re now cheering because it’s gone quiet. Strangely, eerily quiet. Anyway, like with climate change, I hope I’m wrong, and whenever I have my doubts about the whole thing, I think about the ‘Remain’ protests led by Eddie Izzard. Let’s hope these obviously counter-productive demonstrations continue for the next five years. However, one disaster that doesn’t seem to have materialised yet is the warning that Brexit would lead to a brain drain. One guy in the Guardian, called Mr Imhof, says he’s going, which is a shame, as

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The Brexit bounce | 10 September 2016

On the morning of the 24th June, Britain woke to find its stock market shattered and its pound pummelled. It appeared – for a brief moment – like all the prophecies of the Brexit doomsayers, not least the Great Seer Osborne, had come true. But then, from the wreckage of that mid-summer morning, green shoots began to appear, and now, more than two months down the line, it seems that Britain has bounced back. In his cover piece this week, Ross Clark argues that the Remain campaign fell victim to the perils of believing their opinion to be ‘objective fact’, and that economic recovery has humiliated the Treasury, Bank of

Friday

Tom Goodenough

Wetherspoon’s boss is right to mock doomster economists over Brexit

In the referendum run-up, we were inundated with warnings and messages of doom and gloom about the untold damage Brexit would unleash – and unleash immediately. It took a pub boss – Tim Martin, the founder of JD Wetherspoon’s – to add a bit of perspective. Why, he argued, would consumer sentiment plunge of a majority voted Brexit and got what they wanted? Why, if we wouldn’t actually leave the EU for two years, would the economy fall of a cliff? At the time, he was mocked for knowing nothing more than how to pull pints. But now, with the prophecies of economic woe having failed to materialise, it seems he was more

Thursday

Peter Jones

Aristotle on Brexit voters

It comes as no surprise to find that there has recently been much talk among Brexit supporters about ‘the wisdom of crowds’. The question fascinated Aristotle, who discussed it at some length in his Politics. Aristotle (4th century BC) firmly believed that only the ‘best’ should rule. Nevertheless, he had lived in a direct people’s democracy in Athens, and agreed that ‘perhaps, for all its difficulties, it has something to be said for it’. He proceeded to make the case by a series of analogies. The many, he suggested, might be collectively better than the few ‘in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 September 2016

What is happening to estate agents? Or let me put it another way. If the professional classes thought they were going to escape unscathed from ‘free movement of people’ then they were wrong. I feel it is only fair to warn the office workers and the suited and booted that their salaries are no longer safe from the Eurovision job contest. I know this because I have been trying to sell my flat for a while and a part of the problem has been that the agent put in charge of selling it was a young girl who, while sweet, lacked the ideal vocab range. I overheard her doing a

The Spectator

Migrant benefits

Calm is slowly returning to the debate about Britain and Europe. The shrillness of the referendum campaign, and the hysteria from people who ought to have known better, is giving way to an acceptance that the end is not nigh and that things could be as good, if not better, than before. The idea that the British public had somehow voted for a recession is being steadily abandoned. The next stage is to accept that Brexit was not a populist yawp about protecting our borders. It was not a demand to stop immigration, but to manage it better. So when Theresa May rejected an Australian-style points-based immigration system this week,

Jeremy Norman

Mystery on Mount Athos

I have just returned from one of the world’s most secretive states. I had to apply for a visa a month beforehand and send in a copy of my passport. There is no way into this place by road; you have to arrive on an authorised boat and a policeman checks your visa against your passport before you board. Private boats must keep well offshore and may not land. The visa is valid for only three nights; you have to book each night in advance and may not spend more than one night in the same place. Only ten visas are granted a day. Women have always been forbidden here

Mark Nayler

Spain’s political freeze starts to bite

The circus of Spanish politics shows no signs of stopping. For now, the country is managing to weather this eight month-long deadlock surprisingly well: Spain’s GDP growth has continued at one of the fastest rates in the eurozone. But this is in spite, rather than because, of Spain’s zombie government. A record-breaking tourist season has helped, as has a jump in consumer spending. Yet finally, the cracks are beginning to show; and the impasse crippling Spanish politics – which now looks set to lead to the increasingly-likely prospect of a third election on Christmas Day this year – is starting to take its toll. So what’s the hold up? If you’re looking for who to blame, you needn’t

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The Brexit bounce

On the morning of the 24th June, Britain woke to find its stock market shattered and its pound pummelled. It appeared – for a brief moment – like all the prophecies of the Brexit doomsayers, not least the Great Seer Osborne, had come true. But then, from the wreckage of that mid-summer morning, green shoots began to appear, and now, more than two months down the line, it seems that Britain has bounced back. In his cover piece this week, Ross Clark argues that the Remain campaign fell victim to the perils of believing their opinion to be ‘objective fact’, and that economic recovery has humiliated the Treasury, Bank of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Brexit bounce

Next time it comes to redesigning the PPE course at Oxford, I suggest a module beginning with a quotation from George Osborne. It’s something he said to the Treasury Select Committee in May, back when he was still Chancellor: ‘If you look at the sheer weight of opinion, it is overwhelmingly the case that people who look at the case for leaving the EU come to the conclusion it would make the country poorer, and it would make the individuals in the country poorer, too.’ There might be advantages to Brexit, he said, ‘but let’s not pretend we’d be economically better off’. In other words: it wasn’t just George Osborne’s