Eu

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Tough love | 23 November 2017

When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in, the consequences were pretty immediate. Over 160,000 went to Sweden, leading to well-publicised disruption. Next door, things were different. Norway took in just 30,000; this year it has accepted just 2,000 so far. To Sylvi Listhaug, the country’s young immigration minister, this might still be a bit too much. ‘We have a big challenge now to integrate those with permission to stay in Norway to make sure they respect Norwegian values,’ she says. ‘Freedom to speak, to write, to believe or not to believe in

Monday

James Forsyth

What fresh German elections would mean for Brexit and Europe

Angela Merkel’s declaration that new elections would be better than a minority government suggests Germany will be heading back to the polls soon. Though, it should be noted that the decision on whether to call fresh election is technically the German president’s, not Merkel’s. The so-called Jamaica coalition, bringing together Merkel’s CDU, the CSU, the Greens and the economically liberal Free Democrats, can’t be made to work as the collapse of the talks last night showed. The other alternative that would produce a majority government, another grand coalition between the CDU and the SPD, remains highly unlikely. The current consensus in the SPD is that the party needs a spell

Thursday

Iain Hollingshead

Country music | 9 November 2017

Americans may be able to draw on only 250 years of history, but they’re not shy of making a song and dance of it. In early December, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s $1 billion-grossing, hip-hop and show-tune extravaganza about one of the country’s founding fathers will finally open to sold-out crowds in London. It joins the Menier Chocolate Factory’s sold-out revival of Sondheim’s Assassins, the Tony Award-winning musical about the cranks and misfits who have, to paraphrase its opening number, exercised their right to follow their dreams by attempting to assassinate US presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan (but not, yet, Trump). Both shows fit neatly into the American tradition of making successful

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons

Madrid crushes the Catalan independence movement with brutal efficiency

One is the son of a humble baker, whose burning passion for Catalan independence has been all-consuming since he was a boy. The other, a scion of a distinguished Spanish family, is a hard-nosed political operator with a taste for cigars and bullfighting. In the heady days of the referendum, some even dared to dream that the Catalan David would beat Madrid’s Goliath. Yesterday, however, when Mariano Rajoy crushed Carles Puigdemont with merciless efficiency, it was obvious that this was the way it was always going to end. It was a day of high drama shot through at every turn with irony. Ever since declaring independence on Friday, Mr Puigdemont talked

Steerpike Steerpike

The £350m line on the Brexit bus was wrong. The real figure is higher

The most regular attack-line used against leading Brexiteers is that they misled the public over how much money could be used to fund the NHS if Britain left the EU. Throughout the referendum campaign, Vote Leave said that we send £350 million a week to Brussels – a gross figure, applied before a rebate etc. But no one knew the real 2016 figure because the data is compiled in arrears. Only today do we have the data, published by the Office for National Statistics. Its figures show… Payment to Brussels, net of rebate and money returned to the UK: £9.4 billion a year, or £181 million a week. Payment to

Thursday

James Landale

Greece Notebook | 26 October 2017

I have come to Greece in search of sanity over Brexit. Ostensibly it is a symposium to discuss relations between Britain and Greece. But it is also an excuse to step away from the minutiae of the negotiations to think about the future of Europe. It was from Greece, of course, that our continent derived its name — from the mythological Europa who was ravished by Zeus and bore a future king of Crete. One contributor notes dryly that Greece is also not a bad place to think about the rise and fall of empires, the follies of politicians, the failings of institutions and what happens to elites when they

Thursday

Liam Halligan

No deal is a good deal

So Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker enjoyed a ‘broad and constructive exchange’ during their working dinner in Brussels. Last time the Prime Minister broke bread with the President of the European Commission — at Downing Street six months ago — Juncker dubbed her ‘deluded’ and complained about the food. Despite better mood music, this latest supper summit was hardly positive. European Union negotiators still refuse to discuss trade or end the divisive impasse over citizens’ rights until Britain agrees to pay a stonking ‘divorce bill’ — upwards of £40-£50 billion. All the while, the Article 50 clock is ticking. The prospect of a ‘no deal’ Brexit has lately loomed into

Friday

Graham Gudgin

The embarrassing role of economists on Brexit

Just when the Brexit talks were beginning to look humiliating for the UK, the position has begun to be reversed. The absurd EU negotiating framework has stretched the patience of the British side to close to breaking point and preparations are at last being made for the possibility of no deal with the EU. Australians with decades of experience in trade negotiations with the EU tell us that the EU always bargains ferociously and that the only sensible response is a tough one. A negotiating bottom-line of no-deal should have been the British position from the start but going along with the EU’s self-imposed constraints has at least exposed just

Thursday

Jeremy Norman

Catalonia deserves independence as much as any other state

Few, if any, commentators have seen fit to discuss the wider issue and the underlying morality from first principles. The instant reaction in all quarters has been to back Spain over the plucky little Catalans. The principle of national self-determination was laid down by Woodrow Wilson after the First World War and accepted by the colonial powers who unwound their empires, if somewhat reluctantly, over the next half-century. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded partly to advocate for this principal. In the case of Kosovo we actually attacked Serbia for refusing the Kosovans this basic human right. What is so different about Catalonia and the

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons

Franco’s fascism is alive and kicking in Spain

Barcelona After the demonstration in Barcelona on Sunday, I happened to walk past the city’s main police station. A unionist crowd had gathered to praise the officers who had so brutally suppressed the Catalan referendum the previous week. Wrapped in Spanish flags, they were chanting Viva España and throwing flowers. Then they started performing the Nazi salute. I hung around to report on it (a video that I shot on my phone was retweeted many thousands of times). The fascists, I realised, had based themselves in a pub next door. I went in, filming on my GoPro, and saw police drinking with far-Right thugs, smiling as they were serenaded with

Monday

Diego Zuluaga

The conservative case against Catalonia’s separatist narrative

Daniel Hannan has written, compellingly and eloquently as usual, about the constitutional crisis taking place in my country, Spain. In his piece, he invokes the celebrated Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno who, as Spain plunged into civil war in 1936, admonished the anti-intellectual, anti-liberal nationalist rebels that they would ‘vanquish, but not convince’. Unamuno was of course right: after three years of bloodshed, Spain endured nearly four decades of dictatorship, punctured by the deprivations from autarky and international isolation well into the 1950s. But today’s Spain is a much different place. Following Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, the country underwent a peaceful democratic transition which elicited admiration the world over.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Theresa May should appoint a Secretary of State for No Deal

The Brexit talks collapsing would be a bad thing. It shouldn’t be the aim of the UK government, but it should be something that the government is prepared for. After all, there is a non-negligible chance of this happening. Compounding this is that the United Kingdom can’t credibly threaten to walk away from the table unless it is actually ready to do so. Without the ability to walk away, Theresa May will be left having to accept whatever the EU offers. It’s evident that Britain is not currently prepared for a no deal scenario. There needs to be a massive push if the UK is to get itself anywhere near

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Bombardier dispute could actually bring down May’s government

When governments fall it often comes from an unexpected quarter. Thirty eight years ago, James Callaghan’s government fell not as a direct result of the Winter of Discontent but from the fallout over a failed referendum on Scottish devolution. Over the past week we have heard plenty of speculation about Theresa May losing her job thanks to her cough at Manchester or through Brexit-induced civil war in her cabinet. But could we be missing something more obscure but at the same time more ominous? The more I think about it, the gravest danger to the government comes not from its handling of Brexit, universal credit, inflation or any of the

Saturday

Charles Moore

Juncker’s EU vision won’t end well

You can see why Theresa May said in Florence that the British wished the European Union well in its plans for greater integration, while choosing a different path ourselves. There is no point in causing antagonism over what we cannot prevent. But in fact greater European integration will do great harm to all Europeans, including us. The rise of AfD in the German elections was caused almost entirely by Mrs Merkel’s extraordinary decision to admit a million Middle Eastern migrants in a year. The spread of the Schengen area — proposed by Jean-Claude Juncker — combined with recrudescent migrant pressure can only confirm freedom of movement as the impossible issue

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 September 2017

You can see why Theresa May said in Florence that the British wished the European Union well in its plans for greater integration, while choosing a different path ourselves. There is no point in causing antagonism over what we cannot prevent. But in fact greater European integration will do great harm to all Europeans, including us. The rise of AfD in the German elections was caused almost entirely by Mrs Merkel’s extraordinary decision to admit a million Middle Eastern migrants in a year. The spread of the Schengen area — proposed by Jean-Claude Juncker — combined with recrudescent migrant pressure can only confirm freedom of movement as the impossible issue

Taki

High life | 28 September 2017

I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All I know is that I was 39 or 40 years old when the column began, and that I’ve just had my 81st birthday. Keeping a record is not my strong point, and it’s also a double-edged sword. I once planned to publish my diary, but then I stopped keeping one. I’d found passages in it that were dishonest, written in the heat of the moment, most likely under the influence, and the result was a bum-clenching embarrassment. Now I don’t use any social media, certainly not Twitter, Facebook or Instagram,

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Barnier: it may take months to get to phase two of Brexit talks

Theresa May’s Florence speech last week certainly prompted a warming of words from Brussels – but so far it has triggered little action. At today’s press conference between Michel Barnier and David Davis to mark the completion of the fourth round of Brexit talks, the EU’s chief negotiator said not enough progress had been made to move to talking about a UK/EU trade deal in the next round of talks: ‘I think it’s positive that Theresa May’s speech made it possible to unblock the situation, to some extent, and give a new dynamic to the situation. But we are far from being at a stage – it will take weeks,

Wednesday

William Cook

Alternative für Deutschland’s success tells the tale of Germany’s forgotten East

Back in the early 1990s, a few years after the Berlin Wall came down, I went back to the house in Dresden where my father was born. The house was on the outskirts so my father and grandmother survived the bombing – they got the last train out of Dresden before the Red Army arrived. The family I found there had been there since 1945. They’d been expelled from Silesia when Stalin handed the region over to Poland, and had ended up in Dresden along with so many other displaced Germans. They’d been living there for half a century, three generations under the same roof. They didn’t own this house

Monday

Ross Clark

The real winner of Germany’s election is Jean-Claude Juncker

Even if Germany had Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, Angela Merkel would be struggling this morning to form a government. With 33 per cent of the vote, her Christian Democrat and Christian Social alliance has suffered its weakest showing in 68 years – tempered only by the equal failure of the socialists. It might have been a moment for Emmanuel Macron to seize the crown of de facto leader of Europe were it not that he, too, suffered a lower-profile though no less significant electoral reversal over the weekend – in Senate elections the La Republique En Marche party won only 23 of the 171 seats up for grabs. With his

William Cook

Germany’s shy AfD voters hand the Bundesrepublik a seismic shock

The German Embassy in London threw an election party yesterday, but as the guests gathered round the big screens to watch the exit poll the mood became subdued. Of course diplomats are supposed to be neutral and even German journalists strive to be objective, but off the record everyone here in Belgrave Square was saying the same thing: ‘Anyone but AfD.’ Alternative für Deutschland, Germany’s anti-immigration party, has been a thorn in Angela Merkel’s side ever since it was founded four years ago. In Germany’s last election, in 2013, it polled 4.7 per cent – just missing out on the 5 per cent required for representation in the Bundestag, German’s