Brexit

‘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

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

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…

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

‘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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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.

The Brexit drama to come

This week has shown how much the election has changed. The withdrawal agreement has sailed through the Commons and in Northern Ireland, there has been an agreement to get the assembly and the executive back up and running. As I say in The Sun this morning, ministers were struck by how Brexit got only the briefest of mentions at Cabinet this week despite the legislation being before the House. Pre-election, the whole conversation would have been about whether the government had the votes and what it should do if it did not. Boris Johnson is very keen that this year isn’t dominated by Brexit. Sat Cabinet this week, he again

Brendan O’Neill

Why people who hate Brexit love Megxit

It is actually fitting that Harry and Meghan’s decision to leave the UK is being referred to as Megxit. Because this royal temper tantrum, this flouncing out of the UK by the most painfully PC couple in monarchical history, has much in common with Brexit. Like Brexit, it has exposed the vast moral divide that now separates the new elite, of which H&M are key figureheads, from ordinary people. Like Brexit, it has confirmed that this nation is now split, in David Goodhart’s words, between ‘Anywhere’ people and ‘Somewhere’ people. ‘Anywheres’ are post-national, geographically mobile and often sniffy about those old, apparently outdated values of community life and familial loyalty.

A big Tory majority. So where are the Conservative policies?

What is the point of a Conservative majority? The answer might once have been to implement Conservative policies. But now it’s not so clear. Budgets are normally the way to judge a government, but we didn’t have one last year. On 11 March, we will learn how Sajid Javid intends to govern the public finances and just how far the Tory government is able to take advantage of the unprecedented political opportunity. It will become clear whether the government sees this moment as a time for boldness, or caution. Leaving the European Union is a radical act, but its effect is mainly political. It will remove a constraint, but will

James Forsyth

Revealed: Boris’s blueprint for Brexit

For the first time since the referendum, the United Kingdom has a strong government that knows what it wants from Brexit. This will make the second round of the negotiations with the EU very different from the first. Theresa May famously declared, and repeated, that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. This was a soundbite designed to conceal fundamental differences within her cabinet about what it did actually mean. They were never resolved. Many in her cabinet, and especially the Brexiteers, thought that Brexit must mean fully leaving the customs union and the single market. But Philip Hammond, her Chancellor, and Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, thought that it was essential to avoid

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

‘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.