In November last year you wrote that you were busy persuading local Shropshire farmers of the dangers of leaving the EU and asked whether I’d changed my mind about Brexit. We’re leaving this week, in principle anyway. In view of this, how are you (and they, the local farmers) feeling about plans for the future? … More Dear John-2

The Johnson administration seems to be intending a tougher approach to the EU divorce than May’s did – that won’t be difficult. The plan, apparently, is to negotiate trade deals with the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in parallel with the EU negotiations [1]. Where we’ll get the bandwidth to do all this after … More Brexit: Stage 2

What Does the EU Say It Is? What Is the EU Reality? Jean Monnet and other EU founders assumed that peace, harmony and wealth would be natural outcomes from a unified state but that European countries would not be able to keep the peace without supervision at a federal level. From Article 3 of the … More D: Foundations, Governance & EU=Europe

What Does the EU Say It Is? What Is the EU Reality? From the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), Article 14: “The European Parliament shall, jointly with the Council, exercise legislative and budgetary functions. It shall exercise functions of political control and consultation as laid down in the Treaties.” From the … More C: Legal System and Courts

What Does the EU Say It Is? What Is the EU Reality? EU founding father, Jean Monnet, said: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to … More B: Democracy, Subsidiarity & Union-Uniformity

What Does the EU Say It Is? What Is the EU Really? The EU provides an “economy that works for people”, which means they are “working for social fairness and prosperity. The EU’s unique social market economy allows economies to grow and to reduce poverty and inequality.” The current EU/EMU projects are justified by the … More A: Economy, Common Currency & Eurozone

What Evidence Do We Use? Note: An overview of the evidence can be found here: Themes-12: Evidence. (Some items are repeated or extracted in what follows.) Another source of evidence can be found in Aspirations and Outcomes. More up-to-date information can be found on EU websites (https://ec.europa.eu/info/index_en and https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-in-brief_en) and in EU Information, linked here. … More From the Horse’s Mouth

It is amazing how little Brexit is being mentioned in the news at present, let’s hope it never reaches the levels it occupied for most of the past four years. We too have scaled back our activity because there is little to add until the new UK government gets on with enacting the promises on … More New Year Post—An Evidence Review

In late 2018 a spineless British Government accepted a Withdrawal Agreement (WA1) that failed to “Take Back Control” of very much at all from the EU and was denied three times by Parliament. A year later the new Government has stiffened the sinews, summoned up a few changes and passed it (WA2) into legislation. Will … More Are We Nearly There Yet?

So said, or asked, Tony Blair when Labour won the 1997 General Election by a landslide; the same ambiguity seems appropriate after the latest overwhelming victory. To our new Prime Minister it would echo Blair’s rhetorical statement (“I’m sure you agree with me”) but to us it is equivocal (“…, has it or has it … More “A new dawn has broken, has it not?”