Brexit

Saturday

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Obama’s Brexit overreach

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Is Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate a welcome one or should he keep his nose out of our business? Tim Montgomerie says in his Spectator cover piece that such overreach is typical of the US President’s arrogance. But Anne Applebaum disagrees and says that Obama speaks on behalf of many Americans when he calls on Britain to stay engaged in European politics. So should we listen to Obama? Joining Isabel Hardman to discuss is Spectator deputy editor Freddy Gray and the

Friday

Toby Young

There’s nothing ‘racist’ about Boris Johnson’s Obama comments

Nick Cohen is predictably over-the-top in his response to Boris Johnson’s piece about President Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in today’s Sun. He begins by claiming he’s approaching this subject ‘with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey’. He then goes on to reprimand Boris for suggesting Obama has an ‘ancestral dislike of the British empire’ on account of his ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage and links this to his support for the Remain campaign. We’ll come to that comment in a minute, but Cohen goes on to conflate these remarks with the worst excesses of the birther movement: I’m not someone who throws accusations of racism around

John Mills

The Government is running an unfair referendum – and I’ve seen it all before

The Government spent over £9m on a pro-EU leaflet to be distributed to every household before the official campaign began, backed up by a major social media campaign. This is deeply unfair. But it’s no surprise to me. I’ve seen it all before, running up to the 1975 referendum, when I was the National Agent for the campaign for leaving what was then the Common Market. In 1975 there were three leaflets delivered to all households. One was from the National Referendum Campaign, who wanted the UK to come out. One was from Britain in Europe, who wanted us to stay in. The third was from the government, backing up the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Coffee House Podcast: Barack Obama’s Brexit intervention

Barack Obama has waded into the Brexit debate but should he be lecturing us about the EU referendum? On this special edition of the Coffee House podcast, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson is joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth to discuss whether the President’s intervention is a welcome one and whether it will actually work. On the podcast, Isabel Hardman says: ‘I think the out campaign is certainly hoping that Barack Obama will be seen to be patronising British voters and patronising Britain suggesting that it is a sort of weak nation. And I think also the idea of foreign governments lecturing voters on what they should do in their

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Boris Johnson’s attack on Barack Obama belongs in the gutter

Boris Johnson is a former editor of this newspaper, and as such has the right to be treated with a courtesy Spectator journalists do not normally extend to politicians who do not enjoy his advantages. I am therefore writing with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey when I say that Johnson showed this morning that he is a man without principle or shame. He is a braying charlatan, who lacks the courage even to be an honest bastard, for there is a kind of bastardly integrity in showing the world who you really are, but instead uses the tactics of the coward and the

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Obama tells Britain: EU membership makes you stand taller on the world stage

In agreeing to visit the UK midway through an election campaign, Barack Obama guaranteed controversy. As Tim Montgomerie makes clear in his Spectator cover piece this week, many Eurosceptics are angry at the thought of listening to a President with a clear track record of foreign policy failures. Boris Johnson, writing in The Sun this morning, was brimming with the zeal of a convert to the Brexit cause and borrowing from Obama’s trademark. He wrote: ‘Can we take back control of our borders and our money and our system of Government? Yes we can.’ But now Obama has arrived, what is his actual argument for urging Brits to remain in the EU?

Anne Applebaum

Yes, Obama may be deeply annoying. But on Europe, he’s right

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama’s overreach” startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]You don’t like Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Fine, I don’t either. You are impatient to know who the next president will be? Me too. But if you think that the current American president’s trip to the UK this week is some kind of fanciful fling, or that his arguments against Brexit represent the last gasp of his final term in office, then you are deeply mistaken. In Washington, the opposition to a British withdrawal from the European Union is deep, broad and bipartisan, shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike. I should qualify that: the opposition to a

Thursday

The Spectator

Cut the claptrap

So far the campaign for the EU referendum has resembled a contest as to which side can spin the most lurid and least plausible horror stories. On the one hand, the ‘in’ campaign claims that we’ll be £4,300 worse off if we leave; that budget airlines will stop serving Britain and that we will become more prone to terror attacks. Not to be outdone, the ‘out’ side warns that we will be crushed by a fresh avalanche of regulation and immigration, and more prone to terror attacks. The tone of the debate was summed up by Michael Gove this week when he accused the ‘in’ campaign of treating the public

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Swedes tell Britain: if you leave the EU, we’ll follow

If Britain were to leave the European Union, would it survive? Britain is one of the least enthusiastic members of the EU, but other more globally-minded countries are tiring of the protectionism and insularity in Brussels. Reformers in Sweden are aghast at the prospect of Brexit, seeing Britain as their main ally in trying to fight off protectionism (a recent study found an 89pc alignment of our interests, 88pc with the Dutch and Danes). But as many in Britain come to conclude that this fight is lost, and we’re better off out, many Swedes are coming to the same conclusion. According to a poll by TNS Sifo, the largest polling firm in Sweden, 36 per cent

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: Obama’s Brexit overreach

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Is Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate a welcome one or should he keep his nose out of our business? Tim Montgomerie says in his Spectator cover piece that such overreach is typical of the US President’s arrogance. But Anne Applebaum disagrees and says that Obama speaks on behalf of many Americans when he calls on Britain to stay engaged in European politics. So should we listen to Obama? Joining Isabel Hardman to discuss is Spectator deputy editor Freddy Gray and the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How to save Conservatism

Iain Duncan Smith may have lost his job, but he has found a new whisky. It’s called Monkey Shoulder, and they became acquainted when he went to lie low in the Highlands after his resignation. When he went to buy a new bottle from Robertsons of Pitlochry he was told he’d have to wait a few days. ‘I told them not to worry, that I had more time on my hands. The man behind me said: “Yes, we know all about that — you were the talk of the town here for days.”’ It’s an example, he says, of how his resignation struck a far deeper chord than he imagined

Anne Applebaum

He speaks for America

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama’s overreach” startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]You don’t like Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Fine, I don’t either. You are impatient to know who the next president will be? Me too. But if you think that the current American president’s trip to the UK this week is some kind of fanciful fling, or that his arguments against Brexit represent the last gasp of his final term in office, then you are deeply mistaken. In Washington, the opposition to a British withdrawal from the European Union is deep, broad and bipartisan, shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike. I should qualify that: the opposition to a

Tim Montgomerie

Obama’s overreach

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Janet Daley and Freddy Gray discuss Obama’s overreach” startat=27] Listen [/audioplayer]Nobody could describe Donald Trump as lacking in self-confidence, but the billionaire egomaniac is emotional jelly compared with King Barack. Even before he won the Nobel peace prize, Obama was telling America that his elevation to the presidency would be remembered as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow’. He doesn’t have Mr Trump’s gold-plated helicopter, private jet, penthouse and yacht. But when it comes to self-reverence and sheer hauteur there is no one to beat him. Someone who believes his political personality can reverse global warming will have no doubts about his ability

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s heading for a hollow victory

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss the PM’s hollow victory” startat=511] Listen [/audioplayer]‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo. David Cameron may well feel the same about referendums on 24 June. The EU debate is already taking a toll on the Tory party and his premiership. While defeat would be disastrous for him, even victory will come at a heavy political cost. Victory is, for now, still the most likely outcome. Barring a dramatic worsening of the migrant crisis or another eurozone emergency, the uncertainty inherent in leaving the EU will probably mean

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

If you’re riding the FTSE rebound you might still want to sell in May

When the FTSE100 fell close to 5,500 in February, we all said ‘Mr Bear is back’. On Tuesday the index hit a high for this year of 6,400, and we all wondered whether Mr Bear had done what I said he wouldn’t, and shuffled back to hibernation. But the truth is that shares have lately moved in parallel with the oil price, which has perked up partly for technical reasons including temporary curtailment of supply from Kuwait; and a major element of the FTSE recovery is in commodity stocks that had been wildly oversold. So we shouldn’t read any great swing of confidence into a market still 600 points down

Wednesday

Steerpike

Watch: Ed Vaizey grilled by Andrew Neil over George Osborne’s dodgy EU dossier

It fell on Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, to defend George Osborne’s dodgy EU dossier on the BBC’s Daily Politics. As you might expect, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Could he explain why the Chancellor used his new, misleading metric of “GDP per household” instead of the proper (and lower) figure of household income? No, he couldn’t. Could he explain why, if the Chancellor thinks this new GDP-per-household metric is so important, he divided 2030 income by the 2016 number of households (27m) rather than the expected number then (31m)? No. Could he name another Treasury budget, or pre-Budget report, where this GDP per household had ever been used before?

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Vote Leave’s Dom Cummings is grilled by Andrew Tyrie – ‘this sounds like Aladdin’s cave to me’

Popcorn at the ready! Today Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings has been hauled before the Treasury committee to answer questions on ‘the economic and financial costs and benefits of UK’s EU membership’. To begin this, Cummings — who has been described by former colleagues as a Tory Che Guevara — was grilled by the committee’s chair Andrew Tyrie. The tone was set from the start: DC: “I’ve got another meeting at four, so I’ll have to be out of here before that.” AT: “I don’t think you’ve got the hang of these proceedings. We ask the questions and you stay and answer them.” DC: “I’m just telling you when I’ll be leaving.” AT:

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Brexit forecasting is futile – and both sides should just admit it

The most striking thing about the Treasury’s forecast of the impact of Brexit is the relative modesty of its claim that by 2030, assuming a UK-EU trade deal akin to the one negotiated by Canada, ‘our GDP would be 6.2 per cent lower’ while ‘families would be £4,300 worse off’. Since those quotes come from the foreword signed by George Osborne, many voters will distrust the whole document — in which case they might prefer the even more modest ‘worst case’ of a 2.2 per cent GDP hit by 2030 predicted by non-partisan think-tank Open Europe alongside what it calls ‘a far more realistic’ range of possible outcomes ‘between a

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Mark Carney wades into Brexit debate again

Whatever might be said about the Governor of the Bank of England, it’s hard to fault his persistence. Mark Carney has made a habit of wading into the debate surrounding the EU referendum. And based on his appearance in front of the Lords Economic Affairs Committee this afternoon, he isn’t planning on stopping any time soon. Carney repeated the MPC’s warnings about the ‘threats’ from the forthcoming referendum being ‘the most significant near-term domestic risk to financial stability’. He also suggested that the effects of the vote on 23rd June might be materialising already: He spoke carefully and was clearly mindful of criticism he has faced before for appearing to

Steerpike Steerpike

Brexit wars: Leave.EU goad Michael Gove

After Vote Leave were awarded the official designation to campaign for Brexit in the EU referendum, there was much disappointment from Grassroots Out and Leave.EU. So much so that the campaigns’ main funder Arron Banks toyed with the idea of launching a judicial review. However, in the end the Brexit backer decided to be the bigger man and support Vote Leave for the sake of national interests: ‘It is time to turn our collective guns on the real opponents in this campaign: those who are repeatedly trying to scare the British public into thinking that Britain is too small and insignificant to be an independent nation engaged with the whole