Brexit

French president Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini don’t have much in common, but on the importance of the upcoming European elections they agree. For Macron, the vote will be “decisive for the future of our continent”. And for the leader of Italy’s right-wing populist Lega, “May 26 is a referendum between life and death. Those who are still sleeping should wake up.” Yet Macron and Salvini are wrong. Both have misinterpreted these elections and their significance for Europe’s future. And the argument that these votes are a binary and existential struggle between pro-EU forces, led by Macron, and right-wing populists, led by Marine Le Pen and Salvini, is

Labour’s fence-sitting Sir: James Forsyth writes that Mrs May and Mr Corbyn are ‘not, in fact, that far apart’ (‘May’s compromising position’, 11 May). To many, the Labour left is simply playing its very old game of sitting on the fence over the EU. The electorate have spotted it, and Labour paid for it in the local elections. Some of us are old enough to remember Harold Macmillan’s withering mockery of the Labour attitude to the then Common Market in the early 1960s. It recalls the words of the old song: ‘She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no; she didn’t say stay and she didn’t say go!’ The

Oh dear. With Theresa May’s government seemingly on its last legs, it appears that party discipline has all but disappeared on the Conservative benches. The signs of discontent were clear at PMQs today when Tory MP and Brexiteer Peter Bone was given the chance to ask a question, but instead used the opportunity to pass on the views of his local Conservative members to the Prime Minister. Noting how they had been committed to the party for over twenty years and had been knocking on doors for the party ‘week in, week out’, Bone said that they now wanted a no-deal Brexit, and: ‘More importantly, they’ve lost confidence in the Prime

I have been fairly quiet for a bit because I have been struggling to say anything useful about what is going on – or perhaps, more accurately, what is not going on. You see we are living through, and in, the mother of all paradoxes: a time when everything and nothing is happening. On a day to day basis, little of moment takes place: Tory MPs huff and puff that Theresa May must be evicted from Downing Street but bicker about how and when she can be forced out. The prime minister and the leader of the opposition agree that people are fed up with all the Brexit uncertainty but

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe is once again at a crossroads. In 1989 and the years that followed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and Germany was unified. The newly independent, once Communist states – including my home country of Poland – embarked on the road to democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Poland was welcomed back into the European family, and we joined the ranks of Nato. But Europe now faces a threat to its hard-won unity. The threat can be seen in the imminent departure of the United Kingdom, violent protests in France, and the rise of insurgent political parties across the continent

Nigel Farage: This BBC is ‘in denial’ Andrew Marr was joined by Nigel Farage, whose Brexit party is in strong contention to win the European elections that are now required to take place on 23rd May. One poll has even put the fledgling party polling higher than the Conservatives for elections to the UK Parliament. With this in mind, Marr chose to pursue Farage on a number of other areas, which led to the interview rapidly becoming extremely heated. Katy Balls has more on ‘the most ridiculous interview ever’: #Marr asks the Brexit Party Leader Nigel Farage if he’s changed his views on the NHS, climate change, gun control and

I see that the Lib Dems were also involved in trying to put up a joint candidate with the Greens, Renew and the ludicrous Change UK for the Peterborough by-election. This really is the tail wagging the dog. Leave the Greens aside for one moment, Change and Renew are not parties in the accepted sense of the word. Change want to change nothing and its (arriviste) members – as Rachel Johnson brilliantly demonstrated – disagree with nothing in the Lib Dem manifesto. Renew, meanwhile, scarcely exist at all. A more muscular party than the Lib Dems would have told these vaulting, arrogant dilettantes to get stuffed and hammered them at

As I walked through central Oxford at the weekend, an unfamiliar sight greeted me from the top of one of the university’s central buildings: the flag of the European Union had found its way amongst the spires. It fluttered gently in the breeze on the Clarendon Building, only yards from the Bodleian Library in the heart of the city. The flag’s arrival looked like a statement. After all, it is not customary for the university to represent a political entity on its flagpoles. At a time of continued debate across the country, the flag has been widely read as the university taking a stance on an ongoing and fractious national