Brexit

Thursday

The Spectator

Close the deal

It is becoming painfully clear that on Tuesday the House of Commons will be asked to vote on an EU withdrawal bill that is almost entirely the same as the one defeated by 230 votes in January. Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, is seeking to guarantee that Britain will never be trapped in the backstop. If he succeeds, Brexiteers, whatever their wider misgivings, should hold their noses and vote for Theresa May’s deal. It will be tempting for MPs who are seeking a proper break with the EU to repeat their rebellion. May’s deal means Britain will, for two years, be an EU member in all but name: paying all

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 7 March 2019

Home Two 17-year-olds were stabbed to death in London and Manchester, bringing the number of teenagers killed in knife crime this year to ten. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said that there was ‘no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers’. Next day, Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said: ‘There is some link between violent crime on the streets obviously and police numbers, of course there is.’ The owners of Giraffe and Ed’s Easy Diner are to close 27 of their 87 restaurants. The family that has owned the British sports-car maker Morgan for 110 years is selling it to an Italian venture capitalist firm, Investindustrial. The philosopher

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 March 2019

A kind billionaire called Jeremy Hosking, whom I do not know personally, has invited us to join the Britannia Express, a steam train, on 30 March, the day after Brexit. The train will traverse Wales and England, starting at Swansea and ending in Sunderland. In an unspoken rebuke to the metropolis, it will not travel via London. The train will, says the invitation, commemorate ‘the UK’s exit (or non-exit) from the European Union’. This is the opposite, I suppose, of the European train which people like the late Sir Geoffrey Howe constantly exhorted us to climb aboard. What to do? The most likely situation on the day is that we still

J.J. Charlesworth

Keep politics out of art

If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving the EU. As someone on the left, I’ve always argued a left-wing case for leaving. It is, to say the least, an unfashionable position, usually met with anxious looks, sullen silence or overt hostility from one or other artist, curator or art bureaucrat. That the art world should be against Brexit should come as little surprise. It’s striking, however, how far art has become involved in the burning political questions and controversies of the moment, to the extent that making art is often seen as nothing more than an extension

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The odds are still stacked against Theresa May’s Brexit deal

Government loyalists are grim-faced today. There is no sign of a breakthrough in Brussels and Theresa May’s deal appears to be heading for another defeat on Tuesday. May’s problem is that everyone thinks that they get what they want by voting against her deal. As I say in the magazine this week, lots of ERG types have convinced themselves that they’ll eventually get the Brexit they want, come what may. If the Brexit deal goes down on Tuesday, the Commons is highly likely to compel the Government to request an Article 50 extension. At that point, the UK will be a supplicant: it’ll be up to the EU to decide

Alex Massie Alex Massie

If May’s Brexit deal passes, then her troubles really begin

Brexit is breaking British politics. Both the traditional powers have been shipwrecked by this storm and show no signs of knowing how to repair their ruined timbers. This is the sort of thing everyone understands. If the Tories enjoy more support than Labour this is only because Labour is so very bad. It is not because Theresa May’s Government commands the confidence of the people. In any case, her party is slowly but surely devouring itself over Brexit. Again, everyone knows this.  But what if we’re approaching this from the wrong direction? Instead of observing how Brexit is destroying the Conservative party, perhaps we should wonder if, actually, Brexit has

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t vilify housebuilders for profiting from Help to Buy

Was Help to Buy a timely market intervention with a valid social purpose or a political gimmick that unintentionally showered housebuilders with taxpayers’ cash? Or both: this isn’t a straightforward question. ‘This government supports those who dream of owning their own home,’ said a statement from Philip Hammond last week. So far the ‘equity loan scheme’ launched by George Osborne in 2013 and now extended until 2023 has underpinned 194,000 home sales, the great majority to first-time buyers in the provinces, while another 300,000 have been supported by a £3,000 savings top-up. Meanwhile, housebuilders have upped their game as Osborne wished: annual new home numbers, having almost halved by 2013

Nicholas Farrell

Italians

For a few years before coming to Italy, I lived in Paris and I cannot tell you the life-enhancing difference I felt as I crossed the frontier from France into Italy in my metallic burgundy Honda Prelude. On arrival at the Italian motorway toll that stifling summer of 1998, I discovered I had no money and that the sun had melted my bank card which I had left on the dashboard. The charming young woman on the toll-gate simply gave me a form to fill in and waved me through with a smile. Isn’t this how we should run the world? I remember once being stopped by two Italian police

Wednesday

Ross Clark

It’s time for Mark Carney to come clean about Brexit

What wonderful powers that Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, possesses. At a stroke, he has just succeeded in increasing the size of the economy by three per cent. Well, sort of. Only last November, the Bank of England claimed that a no-deal Brexit could cost the UK economy between 4.75 and 7.75 per cent of growth over a three year period, relative to what would happen under May’s deal. Yesterday, he changed his tune a little, telling the House of Lords economic affairs committee the effect of a no-deal Brexit on the UK economy in three years’ time would be between two and 3.5 per cent smaller

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why Brexiteers aren’t backing down

Geoffrey Cox is in Brussels attempting to achieve a breakthrough on the backstop. So far, the Attorney General’s efforts have not gone entirely to plan – with the word in Brussels that the first night of talks with Michel Barnier went badly. If Cox cannot win a significant concession on the backstop that will allow him to change his legal advice, there is little chance of Theresa May’s deal passing next week. However, even if he is successful in his aim there’s a chance it won’t be enough to win over Tory eurosceptics. As I write in the i paper, there is an increasing pessimism within the Cabinet that May

Tuesday

Ivan Rogers

No dealers must dream on: A conversation with Ivan Rogers

Sir Ivan Rogers was in conversation at the Institute for Government. This is an edited transcript of his thoughts on why no-deal isn’t a sustainable outcome, whether there should be a public inquiry into Brexit – and why, when it comes to negotiations, the difficult bit is still to come: Ivan Rogers: Once you get into the trade deal and the economic deal and then associated security and other deals, this is actually the complex bit still to come. It’s much more complex and involves much more of Whitehall, and should involve Westminster a lot more than the exercise to date. I’m not disparaging the exercise to date, but that’s solely

Richard Stone

Investing: Why Brexit doesn’t matter and the unexpected impacts it may have on your investments

The markets are volatile, well at least more volatile than they have been. The FTSE 100 index has already had two days this year where it has moved by more than 2%, in 2017 it only did that once, in the entire year. This has a tendency to make investors cautious and as a result potentially miss out on the benefits of that volatility. History suggests that near term volatility caused by political or economic uncertainty and sentiment has little long term effect on the stock market. The key here is that investing is a long term activity and if you take a long term view you can ignore short

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Will Theresa May vote for a no-deal Brexit?

We have a Tory Government and governing party irredeemably split on the biggest question of our age, namely how and whether to leave the European Union. And we have a Labour opposition in a disorderly civil war between backbench MPs and lords on the one hand, and a leadership team under Jeremy Corbyn over a perceived failure to cut the cancer of anti-Semitism from the party – and, perhaps worse than that, the undermining of due process by officials close to Corbyn. In other words, there is chaos on both sides of the Commons, compounded by the collapse to zero in the working majority of Theresa May’s administration following those

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis can never be solved under Corbyn | 5 March 2019

If racism is to succeed in corrupting institutions and countries it needs authorisation from the elite. The popular caricature of the racist as a white working-class man, or superstitious east european peasant, or shabby paranoid academic, shows not only class bias, but a lack of understanding that what transforms extremism from poisonous men muttering in corners to political movements with the power to ruin lives, is the authorisation given by leaders and intellectuals. A party can have racist members – as the Conservative party undoubtedly does. But because its leadership is not anti-Muslim their effect is constrained to personal abuse. I don’t mean to diminish it. If my experience is

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Theresa May’s bung shows she still doesn’t understand Brexit

When will politicians learn they can’t just buy off voters? You think they would have twigged this during the EU referendum campaign when the Remain camp’s Project Fear utterly failed to sway the electorate’s feelings about the EU. Every household will be £4,300 worse off, the Treasury claimed, which a) wasn’t true and b) looked to many voters like a cynical bung designed to wean them off their Euroscepticism. Such chattering-class cluelessness was on full display in the aftermath of the referendum too. How could people in regions that have received oodles of EU cash — parts of Wales, the old industrial north of England — turn against the EU,

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The lawyers are taking back control of Brexit

Should the UK’s decision to leave the UK be settled in an argument between seven male white middle-aged Tory lawyers plus one woman of Indian ancestry and – on the other side – a single white middle-aged male Tory lawyer? Because arguably that is what’s happening, in the current off-stage conversation over a possible reform to the Northern Ireland backstop between the Tory Brexit European Research Group’s “star chamber” of eight lawyers, on the one hand, and the attorney general Geoffrey Cox – whose outcome could well decide whether Theresa May’s Brexit deal, with all its massive implications for this nation’s future, is approved in the coming nine days. Because

Saturday

James Forsyth

10 days to save Brexit

MPs have 10 days to pass Theresa May’s Brexit deal or calamity strikes, I say in The Sun this morning. May’s deal is far from perfect. But what will happen if it doesn’t pass is truly appalling. If May’s deal hasn’t won a Commons vote by March 12th, the Commons will vote on whether to proceed with no deal. The parliamentary arithmetic is such that no deal will almost certainly be defeated. The next day, parliament will then vote on whether to request an extension from the EU. This vote will almost certainly pass. At this point, the United Kingdom would be in the weakest position it has ever been

Friday

Tom Harwood

The myth of the ‘millennial’ Corbyn project

The myth at the heart of the ‘Corbyn project’ is that it is a grassroots movement of enthusiastic young people. This group, so the theory goes, is disgusted by free markets and longs for industries to be nationalised and collectives of workers to seize control of the means of production. Books have even been written about how the ‘young’ have ‘created a new socialism.’ But if this is true, why does a poll today reveal that support for the newly-formed centrist Independent Group predominantly come from young people? Forty-seven per cent of 18-24 year olds approve of the creation of TIG, with just 14 per cent disapproving of it. This is strange behaviour from an

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What does Putin really make of Britain’s Brexit mess?

When it comes to Brexit, Britain’s friends, neighbours, trade partners and even antagonists are generally united in one thing: wondering what on earth is going on. In Russia, there is a particular cocktail of satisfaction and bewilderment. The satisfaction is predictable. From the Kremlin’s point of view, the whole Brexit extravaganza is a gift, regardless of the eventual outcome. Putin’s strategy is essentially to divide, distract and demoralise the West, so that either we are sufficiently worn down to strike a deal that grants Russia the status he craves – essentially as hegemon of Eurasia and a fixture in any global negotiations – or else we are so fragmented, feuding

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 February 2019

It’s now or never Sir: I read with great interest Paul Collier’s suggestion (‘Take back control’, 23 February) that Britain should withdraw Article 50 and remain in the EU as a means of obtaining a better exit at some point in the future. This would be a UK humiliated by the inability of parliament to carry out the clear direction of the voters after nearly three years. A UK so abjectly defeated it would hardly be in any position to build alliances. What EU country would want to endanger its reputation by supporting the country which has been taught such a salutary lesson by the European Commission? The lack of