Brexit

Monday

Ross Clark

Nissan’s post-Brexit plan exposes the limits of Project Fear

Brexit voters are, of course, mostly fools who don’t know what is good for them – in contrast to all those Remain voters with their degrees and analytical skills. But none are so dim-witted as those in Sunderland who, like turkeys voting for Christmas, chose a course of action which will inevitably lead to them losing their jobs at the city’s Nissan plant. Or maybe not. It turns out that Sunderland’s Nissan workers might not be quite so stupid after all. It’s been revealed that the company is looking at a scenario in which it would close its EU plants and transfer production to Sunderland instead, raising its UK output

Sunday

Ross Clark

Lord Kerr’s ‘stupid’ Brexit jibe shows some Remainers have learned nothing

I have always loved the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who refused to believe the Second World War was over and stayed hiding in the Philippines until his former commanding officer was brought out of retirement and ordered him to surrender. That was in, 1974, 29 years after the end of hostilities. But I wouldn’t bet on the final Remainer holdouts giving up their struggle so quickly. If Lord Kerr of Kinlochard can be gently persuaded out from behind one of the red benches in the House of Lords before 2049 – when he’ll be 106 – I would consider it a triumph of negotiation. It would be

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: ‘One year is enough’ to complete a UK-EU trade deal, says Tusk

Donald Tusk – ‘One year is enough’ to complete trade deal Andrew Marr spoke to the former President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. Boris Johnson’s critics have heaped scorn upon the idea that the UK and the EU can reach a comprehensive free trade agreement without extending the current Brexit transition period past the end of 2020. Tusk however, begged to differ on this: DT: One year is enough to finalise our negotiations… We have to demonstrate good will on both sides… Business is business… The campaign is also over. The game is over. The EU was either ‘bogeyman’ or ‘whipping boy’ Tusk lamented how he felt the EU

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why Australia-style deal is the new Brexit buzzword in government

As the second round of Brexit negotiations loom with the EU, there’s already talk of an early bust-up coming up the track. James reports in his Sun column that the UK and the EU are currently very far apart when it comes to expectations for the trade talks. Figures on the Brussels side believe that they can get the UK to sign up to things – such as a continued role for the European Court of Justice – when Boris Johnson is seeking a much looser arrangement. This distance between the two sides means that figures in government have already begun work on a Plan B in the event Johnson

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Will the word ‘Continental’ make a comeback after Brexit?

Feasting on the remnants of my edible Christmas presents during the otherwise frugal month of January, I experienced a frisson when I opened the box of Thorntons ‘Continental’ chocolates. For anyone who grew up in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the word ‘Continental’ carries with it a waft of balmy air from the Mediterranean, a sense of longed-for glamour, pleasure and breakfast on a balcony, unavailable on this rainy, cut-off island. I’m wondering whether, as we leave the EU and return to being a small country across the water from a many-countried, warmer landmass, the word ‘Continental’, and the concept, will come back into use. Do other small countries across

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

‘We will never return, there is no going back’: the Brexit Day party, as it happened

Remainers were there too. The first people I met at the Brexit Day festivities were opposed to the whole idea. I found them on Westminster Bridge, a man and his wife, posing with an EU flag. When the man spoke his voice faltered as if his pet spaniel had just died. ‘I married a German woman. I’ve been brought up to tolerate other cultures and lifestyles.’ I asked which of the many crises outlined by Project Fear would strike us first. ‘Economic slump,’ he said. Will Britain ever re-join? ‘Maybe in two generations.’ A couple with a toddler spotted the EU flag and joined us for a chat. They’d planned

Friday

James Forsyth

The UK has left the EU

In practical terms, little has changed tonight. Businesses and citizens here will not feel any real difference in the coming weeks and months as they interact with the EU. But in another sense, everything has changed tonight. The UK is now out of the EU and the bar for rejoining will be very high. First of all, a party would have to win an election on a rejoin platform and then, probably, have a referendum. It is hard to imagine a party serious about winning office choosing to reopen this issue in the foreseeable future. Second, there would have to be a national consensus in favour of rejoining. The EU

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Ignore the Brexit day party poopers – it’s time to celebrate

Don’t gloat. Don’t be too triumphalist. Don’t wave your flags too boisterously. Don’t say or do anything that might offend sad, pained Remainers, who will be huddled in their homes, looking with bemusement and concern upon the terrible new world that will be born at 11pm tonight. All of these warnings are being issued to Leavers today as we gear up for our Brexit Day celebrations. Be humble, we’re told. Be magnanimous. Be quiet. And the party-pooping isn’t only coming from Europhiles who think the end of our membership of the EU is tantamount to the End of Days. Like London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has expressed concern that after

Steerpike Steerpike

Oxford college fails to get in the mood for Brexit day

It’s finally Brexit day, but while some are celebrating, others are finding it hard to get into the mood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Britain’s departure from the EU isn’t going down well in Oxford. As well as flying an EU flag over the Town Hall today, the city is also holding a candlelight vigil for the EU later this evening. Students there are also getting into the spirit. Here’s a university lunch menu from today, sent over by Mr S’s mole at Mansfield College: Mr S fancies Out After 47 Years with a side of Farmers’ Subsidies…

Mary Dejevsky

Brexit day is a gloriously muted occasion

Whatever your feelings about Brexit, this day, 31 January, 2020, will be seen as a point in history. It is the day that the UK left the European Union after nearly half a century and set out, once again, on its own. While we may have been through more than three years of parliamentary wrangling, two elections and something akin to a constitutional crisis to get here, the actual day itself is being marked with characteristic understatement – just a little bit. Bongs from Big Ben were ruled out with two weeks to go, a flag display promised as consolation. No one even dreamt of demanding that Westminster Abbey peal

The Spectator

‘Bye Bye Brits’: European papers herald Brexit day

At 11pm tonight, Britain will finally leave the European Union, after 47 years inside the bloc. And, as expected, many European newspapers chose to mark Brexit day on their front pages. Le Figaro: ‘L’adieu a l’Europe Liberation: It’s time La Croix: See you! Le Monde: Europe enters the unknown Die Welt: The British leave. The Germans suffer El Pais (online): A new era without the UK Berlingske: Bye-bye, Brits Algemeen Dagblad: Farewell Dagens Nyheter De Tijd Gazeta Wyborcza: Brexit – a lesson for Poland Rzeczpospolita: Abandoned Europe The Irish Times: Britain leaves the European Union not with a bang, but a whimper

James Kirkup James Kirkup

You can thank Remainers for the hardness of this Brexit

The first chapter of Britain’s Brexit story ends tonight. For some, that’s something to celebrate. For others it means sadness. For most of us, I suspect, emotions are mixed: a bit of relief at the sense of clarity that underpins politics; a bit of optimism that we might all learn from the psychodrama/culture war of 2016-2019; a bit of foreboding about the Brexit dramas still to come. I voted Remain. I believed that despite its flaws (and I know them well: I covered more than 50 EU summits as a reporter, and projects including birth of the euro, the stability and growth pact and the European Constitution) Britain’s long-term interests

Thursday

Steerpike

The five stages of Brexit grief

It’s been more than three years since the Brexit referendum, and we’re only a day away from actually leaving the EU, but it appears that some of the UK’s residents are still struggling to come to terms with the country’s exit from the European Union. Today, the pollster YouGov released a survey of Remain voters in the UK, in which it asked which of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) closest described how they feel about the EU referendum result. The options ranged from the rather sanguine, ‘I have come to terms with the fact that the UK will leave the EU’, to full-throated denial,

Fiona Mountford

Will ‘performative Europeanness’ end on Brexit day?

The Rubicon has almost been crossed, the die has almost been cast and whatever other choice phrases from European history spring to mind. As we leave the European Union, to the cheers of the 52 per cent and the tears of the 48, what most interests me as a reluctant Remainer is how, or indeed whether, it will affect our collective national sense of Europeanness. In certain – London, metropolitan – quarters, this somewhat elusive quality has been getting an exhaustive airing and we may well need to brace ourselves for a further mass outbreak of EU flag waving in the coming weeks. One of the most fascinating aspects of

Tuesday

Charles Day

The Brexit wrangle shows exactly why we needed to leave in the first place

Last Friday marked the signing of the Withdrawal Agreement. I know that some people in our country are still a bit upset. But what happened last week matters. We all know that we’ve just had three and a half difficult years. But we had them together – we shared them. Three and a half years of parliament being gloriously frustrating, entertaining and overall a bit odd. Three and a half years of our courts and our beloved institutions forcing us to try very hard to recall why we love them. Three and a half years of democracy. After these three and a half years, our parliament, the body of 650

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

The deranged rage against the Brexit 50p coin

Remoaners are having the mother of all meltdowns. What’s rankled them this time? The Brexit 50p, of course. Yes, they’re now raging against a coin. I’m genuinely starting to worry about these people. To clarify, I’m not talking about Remain voters. There were 16.1m of those and the vast majority of them are perfectly normal people who understand how democracy works. They aren’t having sleepless nights about the new 50p, released to mark the UK’s departure from the EU. No, I mean hardcore Remainers, the FBPE people, the folks who think Brexit is literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to Blightly. I mean the kind of people who think

Thursday

Ross Clark

Will house prices rise after Brexit?

A headline in the Times this week appeared to speak of a boom in house prices since the general election: “Housing Market Enjoys Boris Boost as Prices Rise at Record Rate”. Given Britain’s history of house price booms and busts that sounded dramatic indeed, so what did it really mean? The ‘record’ which turned out to have been broken turned out to be the change in asking prices – as measured by property website Rightmove – between December and January. This month, the average asking price for a property in Britain is £306,810, £6785 or 2.3 percent higher than it was in December. The previous highest uplift that Rightmove has

Wednesday

Alexander Downer

The free trade deal Britain must sign up to after Brexit

Now the UK is leaving the EU, Boris Johnson’s government can start planning a serious trade strategy for life after Brexit. So far the focus has been on a UK/US free trade agreement. But before that, the initial challenge for Britain will be to establish a rational set of priorities. First, the government must ask what resources is it prepared to commit to trade policy? Second, it needs to establish what trade agreements would be most beneficial to the UK economy. After all, there’s no point in giving priority to a laborious trade negotiation with, say, Burkina Faso, if the benefits of that agreement would be very limited. And third,

Tuesday

Gavin Barwell

How to run Number 10: An insider’s guide

Gavin Barwell was Theresa May’s chief of staff between 2017 and 2019. He was the MP for Croydon Central between 2010 and 2017 and served May as secretary of state for housing. He was made a life peer last year. This is a transcript of a speech he gave to the Institute for Government last night. I became chief of staff to the prime minister in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 election. I had lost my seat, the result was declared in the early hours of Friday morning. I went back to bed because I’d been up for about 30 hours at that point. And then I did a media

Sunday

Robert Tombs

Britain after Brexit: it’s time to decide on our place in the world | 12 January 2020

‘Global Britain’: a phrase that provokes mockery and even indignation. As an alternative to EU membership many consider it impossible and worse, undesirable. Are we capable of true independence, or is this an illusion? Does ‘global Britain’, as its bitterest critics accuse, draw on imperial nostalgia and nationalistic arrogance? Or is it a rational response to a changing world? It is certainly not a new response. Britain has been a global player since the 1730s. Since the early 1800s we have had to be: with a population of 14 million we were no longer able to feed ourselves, and Britain’s enemies looked forward to the day when it would starve.