Eu

Leaving the EU should boost pay and create more jobs. Spending our own money on our own priorities ensures that is true from the first post Brexit budget onwards. The dreary gloomy predictions of Remain are all based on the absurd idea that the rest of the EU will want to impose new barriers on their trade with us, and will be able to do so. As we are more the customer than the supplier and as we and they live under World Trade Organisation rules this is pure fantasy. There is one feature of the Treasury’s ludicrous forecasts for 2030 that I agree with. They reckon the UK will

It was Michael Gove’s turn in the Sky hot-seat tonight and he came determined to make the democratic case for Brexit. In the initial exchanges, Faisal Islam went after Gove hard on the question of how many economists, international institutions and countries back Britain leaving the EU. Islam pushed Gove to name 11 economists who back Brexit, Gove declined to do so. Islam then asked Gove why the British public should trust him, to which Gove replied that he was asking the British public to trust themselves. But the bigger challenge for Gove was always going to be dealing with the audience questions, which he is far less used to

‘No one can seriously deny that European integration brought an end to Franco-German conflict and has settled the German question for good,’ wrote Niall Ferguson in the latest Sunday Times. I hesitate when confronted by such an assertion by such a learned professor. But I think I would seriously deny it, or at least seriously question it. Surely what brought an end to Franco-German conflict was the utter defeat of Nazi Germany. European integration was a symptom of that end, not its cause. As for settling the German question, isn’t it too early to say? The eurozone is the first large non-German area to have been dominated by Germany since

This EU referendum is a particularly difficult contest to poll and after the general election we all should be wary of treating them as gospel. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the mood in Westminster—and on the two campaigns—is heavily influenced by the polls. The recent good numbers for Leave have put a string in its step. They have also ensured that Vote Leave’s focus on immigration in the last few days isn’t seen as the last roll of the dice but as an attempt to focus on one of its strongest areas. Interestingly, influential figures on the Remain side privately accept that the referendum appears to

The latest EU referendum poll indicates that voters have swung considerably towards backing Brexit. 52 per cent of people surveyed said they were planning on voting for Britain to leave the European Union, compared to 48 per cent who are voting in. The ICM poll, carried out for the Guardian, is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it flies in the face of the prevailing view that remain has surged ahead. In recent weeks, those campaigning for Britain to stay put in Europe appear to have enjoyed a significant margin of support over the leave campaign. A poll of polls compiled by WhatUKThinks last week suggested an almost exact opposite to the figures

The absence of an outline of a post-exit immigration regime is a serious gap in the Referendum debate. That need not be so. There is a fairly clear way ahead: to minimise disruption, while achieving control of numbers. The key element that needs to be controlled is migration for work (which accounts for the bulk of net EU migration). This could be sharply reduced if EU immigrants were subject to the same requirement for work permits as now currently apply to non-EU workers: the aim would be to reduce the overall scale of immigration without losing the economic benefit of highly skilled immigration. By doing this, net migration – 330,000