Brexit

If Keir Starmer has a strategy, it’s this: to paint his party as more competent than the Tories while keeping his head down on almost everything else. The aim of this is to ensure Labour can crawl across the line come the next election, winning a majority with a bit of help from the SNP. There’s a big problem with this approach though: it’s the same one that failed to work for Ed Miliband. To beat it, Boris Johnson need do little more than recycle the Tories’ 2015 campaign, which depicted Miliband in Salmond’s pocket, substituting Sturgeon in his place. The other problem with the ‘do as little as possible’ strategy is that it will almost certainly result

Of all the charges made against Brexiteers, the notion that we ‘don’t understand the modern world’ is the one that some Remainers have most often returned to; their equivalent of the boxer’s stinging jab that relentlessly wears down an opponent. In a global system increasingly dominated by a handful of big players with huge populations and land mass – the US, China, India, Russia – being a medium-sized nation in Europe without the umbrella of the EU was supposed to be a mug’s game. In the European Parliament, that arch-federalist Guy Verhofstadt would often refer to the countries of Europe as ‘dwarfs’ who needed to band together to compete in

A year ago today Britain awoke to a rather muted celebration – which seemed to consist largely of a bubble car driving around Parliament Square with a Union Jack in tow – ready to face up to a brave new future outside the EU. Who would have imagined then that the Observer would mark the first anniversary by running a leading article condemning the EU as ‘shambolic’ and instead praising Boris Johnson’s government for something Britain did all by itself? Of course, the Observer’s judgement is only in respect to one thing: the EU’s joint vaccination procurement programme. Nevertheless, it is something rather important, on which a great number of

At first, it sounded like empty rage. The European Union had spent all week making wild statements about controlling vaccine exports — even challenging the notion of contract law. On Friday, it has started to act on its words and announced it will introduce controls on vaccines made in the EU — potentially giving itself the power to stop Pfizer sending Britain the vaccines it has paid for. Worse, when it made the announcement, it included Northern Ireland. The EU was set to use the ‘last resort’ mechanism in the recently-agreed Northern Ireland Protocol, Article 16, that can unilaterally impose a land border: something both the UK and EU spent years trying to

This is a crucial year for the UK’s two most important relationships, I say in the magazine this week. If the Johnson/Biden diplomatic relationship has got off to a better start than expected, the same cannot be said of the post-Brexit UK/EU one. The alignment between Johnson and Biden on climate change, Russia and China is helping the alliance. This relationship should become closer still given the two side’s agreement on China, the most important geo-political issue of the decade. The EU will attempt, often in not particularly edifying ways, to assert itself as the bigger partner. Earlier this month, Kurt Campbell — who will hold the pen on Asia

The EU is now insisting that AstraZeneca use vaccine produced at its UK site to make up for a shortfall in its supplies to the EU. This is likely to kick off a major row as the UK went to great trouble to ensure that it had first refusal on all the Oxford vaccine produced in the UK. Indeed, AstraZeneca’s willingness to accept that condition is a major reason why Oxford ended up partnering with them. It is not hard to see how this situation could escalate. The EU is already saying that companies should notify them before exporting vaccine out of the bloc, and the German government is going further, calling for

‘All non-essential travel should be strongly discouraged both within the country and of course across borders,’ Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, has said. As a result of the Covid crisis, the dream of open borders across the continent of Europe has never seemed so imperilled. Meanwhile, a post-Brexit Britain has the ability to flex its borders as much as it chooses. To some Brexiteers, this alone makes Brexit worth it. The Schengen agreement was signed in 1985 and became pan-EU in 1999, meaning that, from then on, any country without an opt-out needed to allow free movement of people from any other signatory country (almost all

It is petty, small-minded, mean-spirited, and childish. It is certainly not difficult to think of a few adjectives to describe the UK’s decision to refuse diplomatic status to the European Union’s mission in London. Diplomats, and European ones in particular, take matters of status, protocol and etiquette very seriously, and the snub looks, on the surface at least, designed to diminish our closest neighbour. The ambassador for, say, Mozambique, or Honduras, has full diplomatic recognition, but not the person representing the 440 million strong trading bloc on the other side of the English channel. Wars have been started over lesser slights.  But hold on. Sure, you can argue that the