To cover posts relating to Brexit
At their Vienna summit this month EU leaders, as expected, refused to give M. Barnier permission to move on to the crucial issue of trade, but they did agree to discuss it amongst themselves. Chancellor Merkel said enough progress had been made to encourage her to think it will be possible to “take the work … More Vienna Sunshine
A petition presented recently to the UK Parliament asks why we don’t just leave the EU now. Here is the short text; the full text can be found here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/200165?reveal_response=yes To trigger a debate in Parliament the petition needs to gather 100,000 signatures. It can be signed online and has so far (at the time … More Negotiating Petition
Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, has said, in response to a House of Commons statement by Theresa May, that both the EU and the UK may need to start planning for the negotiations to fail to reach an agreement – the ‘no deal’ outcome. He said that there is no chance that the … More Negotiating – really?
A deliberate typo might have this as ‘Barniers to Exit’ but that would not only be a bad pun but also unfair on the man, who is only the mandated mouthpiece for an organisation that cannot win hearts and minds but believes that it does not need to, because it will suffice to win the … More Barriers to Exit
A miscellany of topics on EU-UK relationships. The final topic describes how the international road transport convention (TIR) allows consignments to cross a border without checks at the point of entry. “No country will have to pay more” (Theresa May in Florence): this is an important statement. Countries like Poland share many of Britain’s concerns … More Snippets (1)
This post is the fifth and final of our series in which we extract evidence from ten EU documents. This post focuses on the Brexit negotiations and why we believe that while the UK is negotiating the EU is not; it has a different agenda. Overtime Lords was the first in the series, Democracy or … More Negotiations
Our most recent post took a sympathetic, if lukewarm, overview of Theresa May’s speech in Florence on September 22nd. In this follow-up post we extract some quotations that we think are significant and offer our comments. We are not as dismissive as most commentators we have read though we don’t find much of substance in … More May in Florence (2)
The good things about the Prime Minister’s speech in Florence on Friday are that it appears to have the support of her party and Labour has claimed it was stolen from its own policy. If it results in a mainly unified UK and unlocks the negotiations, leading to a fair outcome at a reasonable price, … More May in Florence (1)
The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill 2017-19 seeks to pass all EU law into UK law so that the legal situation initially remains the same after Brexit and can then be changed over time, thus eliminating a legal “cliff edge”, for businesses in particular. Labour and others oppose the Bill on the grounds that many of … More Henry VIII Rules, OK?
Wouldn’t it be good if we could pick the cherries we liked from the EU bowl and leave the rotten ones that give us indigestion? And what would be wrong with that, provided every nation could do the same? The cherries nobody likes would be thrown in the rubbish or recycling bins (there may be … More Cherry Picking is Good
This EU Won't Work 