Starmer can’t dodge the Europe question for ever. In office, the economy will answer it for him
18/04/2024
Closer alignment between a Labour government and the EU is a certainty. But the divisive binary choices of 2016 are ancient history.
Agriculture is in a crisis created by Brexit, and farmers are furious.. as Jacob Rees-Mogg found out.
In the run-up to the 2016 referendum, Conservative campaigners sold Brexit as the answer to all of the country’s problems. Leaving the EU would transform the UK’s economic prospects, making us all richer. It would free up money to spend on the country’s public services, most notably the NHS. It would restore control over the country’s immigration system, helping to reduce migration levels.
One Europhobe is finally waking up to the costs of leaving the EU.
Brexit is not as secure as it appears [£]
01/02/2024
Voters have concluded that leaving the EU was a mistake because all the government can offer is damage limitation.
The price of the Tories’ new border regime beggars belief. In a cost of living crisis, it’s a bill we can’t afford.
I thought it was a hoax. When The National ran a story in November saying that the Tory “Bullingdon boys” were set to reintroduce the pint measure for champagne, I’m ashamed to admit I had my doubts.
Governments must acknowledge the fundamental reality that migrant workers don’t take jobs and benefits, but fill in essential labour needs
British repudiation of the European human rights convention could blow a hole in the Belfast Agreement
02/12/2023
We have been here before. Several times. Five consecutive Tory PMs up to Rishi Sunak speculated about, or advocated, repudiating the European Convention (and Court) of Human Rights, which Britain helped draft in 1951, and of which Boris Johnson had previously spoken warmly as “one of the great things we gave to Europe”.
There was little doubt who came ahead in the spat between Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and Rishi Sunak last week over Britain rejoining the EU. She began her salvo acknowledging that the EU had “goofed up” in losing Britain, but that it would fall to her children’s generation “to fix it”. The “direction of travel was clear”. Britain one day would rejoin.
The Irish News view: NIO minister Steve Baker is wrong to say basis of unity vote should change
Having, by his own admission, completely failed to understand the horrors that the EU referendum would unleash on the politics of the United Kingdom, it is partly grimly ironic, but mainly just grim, that self-described Brexit hardman Steve Baker is now bringing to bear his unique brand of absolutely no wisdom whatsoever to the political sensitivities of Northern Ireland.
Brexit Britain is back in the 1950s
16/08/2023
Brexit has returned Britain to a black-and-white past. Arguments of 70 years ago must now be won again.
With reliance on EU products returning to pre-Brexit levels, closer supplier ties will be essential to managing uncertainty in the market, writes Pablo Cristi Worm.
Supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights must seize the moment and confront right-wing propaganda demanding the UK leaves it now - or risk a Brexit-style disaster, argues Kevin Maguire.
As the years have rolled on, the enormous disadvantages of leaving the European Union have been there for all to see but the supposed benefits touted by those who brought us Brexit have remained entirely conspicuous by their absence.
The reality of Brexit is starting to hit us all - and even those who voted to leave the EU are getting upset.
“Car crash!” exclaimed managing director Andrew Varga, whose Brexit progress I have been following since the referendum. News of the latest Brexit U-turn landed on him on Tuesday out of the blue. All his years of preparation for a new UK product safety mark, all his thousands of pounds wasted, all the uncountable hours and effort were rendered pointless, at a stroke.
The hot rhetoric of ‘taking back control’ of our borders is being replaced by cold reality.
There’s a growing understanding in Britain that the country’s vote to quit the European Union, a decisive moment in the international rise of reactionary populism, was a grave error.
The commercial departments of Brexit-supporting newspapers know the damage being caused to the UK economy, and newspaper advertising revenues, by Brexit. Their editorial colleagues continue to support it anyway.
No bank is obliged to give anyone facilities if it doesn’t wish to – the same as if Farage was barred from a pub or banned from a shop, writes Sean O’Grady.