Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
Brussels appeared to be finally getting serious with a rogue member state this week. A couple of days ago it announced that it would use its power – which it obtained last year – to withhold €7.5 billion (approximately £6.4 billion) from Hungary unless Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government cleaned up its act on corruption. The
A vital part of gamesmanship, according to the British author Stephen Potter, is to disconcert your opponent before they have joined the game. True to form, gamesmanship has already begun in earnest on one matter likely to be high up in Liz Truss’s pending in-tray: the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations. It comes both from the EU
Opinion polls these days don’t normally raise more then passing interest. But there are always exceptions worth a second look. One such was a YouGov survey out on Wednesday on what people thought about university finance. The big question was whether they believed nearly £30,000 for three years at college was good value for money.
A fair number of episodes in the history of this country are frankly best forgotten. The last thing to do with them, one might have thought, would be to memorialise them with bank holidays. Giving people in Britain a day off to mark, say, Cromwell’s harrying of Ireland in the 17th century, or the starting
You wouldn’t normally electrify the world with a press release detailing a formal UK legal demand for discussions and possible arbitration about non-admission to Horizon Europe, a EU-led scientific research programme which in all probability most people will never have heard of. But, as you may have gathered from recent news reports, there is more
Is the EU about to shatter? There is increasing talk of it after the bloc’s well-publicised difficulties with Poland and Hungary in the last week or so. This is almost certainly premature: nevertheless, the events are significant, and even if they do not break the EU they could precipitate some profound changes. For some time,
There is an excellent religious case to be made for environmentalism. Roger Scruton ten years ago made the point that a ‘natural piety’ is inherent in most of us. Scruton argued this was a call to be responsible for the environment and urged us to love the earth and not to exploit it. This argument
When a pressure group moves from promoting the rights of a minority to trying to micromanage the behaviour of the majority, we should be worried. When large numbers of organisations in both the public and private sectors dance to the tune of that body, we should be more so. Stonewall is a case in point,
Sex offences, violence and fraud have spiked, according to the latest crime figures. Meanwhile, the number of convictions remains staggeringly low: in England and Wales, more than 99 per cent of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. In short, there’s plenty for the police to get on with. Yet worryingly, officers are sometimes kept busy
Yesterday Suella Braverman unequivocally stated that, as Prime Minister, she would work to withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The reaction she encountered on social media was, of course, predictable. To say she was portrayed as a right-wing nut-job, a kind of amalgam of Cruella de Vil and Josiah Bounderby, Dickens’s
Last Thursday saw a wry twist to the Ukraine war. The European Court of Human Rights solemnly intoned that Russia should stop the execution of two Englishmen condemned to death in the Donetsk People’s Republic for fighting for Ukraine. It knew perfectly well it was screaming into the void. Russia, though technically in the ECHR
As if the Church of England didn’t have enough to worry about with leaky roofs, empty churches and lack of money to pay priests, it now has the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice, or ACRJ. Appointed a year ago, this group of twelve of the great and good, under ex-Labour Cabinet minister Paul Boateng, has
Progressive outrage greeted this week’s US Supreme Court majority decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. ‘Extreme ideology,’ thundered Joe Biden. It was ‘a huge blow to women’s human rights’ according to Michelle Bachelet at the UN; a case of ‘back to the Middle Ages,’ in the view of one melodramatic performer at Glastonbury. These are understandable views. But
The EU will formally add Ukraine to its list of candidate countries this Friday. But if you look carefully beneath the pomp, you will see this is much less of a big deal than Brussels would have you believe. For one thing, the gesture is symbolic. The list of official EU candidates is a bit
Last night’s abrupt order from the European Court of Human Rights that led to the grounding of the first Rwanda deportation flight delighted progressives everywhere. They will of course say – rather in the fashion of twentieth-century home secretaries calmly refusing to reprieve a condemned murderer – that the law is merely taking its course,
Conservatives in Wales are jumpy. Seeing Boris’s name as poisonous on the doorstep, a number of them have suggested disaffiliating from the national party and forming their own Welsh Conservatives as the party of the right west of Offa’s Dyke. Some in the central party in London are, perhaps unsurprisingly, aghast: one unnamed Tory MP has
Boris Johnson insists that his victory in last night’s confidence vote means he will be able to ‘draw a line under issues our opponents want to talk about’. But what the result actually shows, as Boris undoubtedly knows, is that even some of those who backed him in the vote now want him gone. Why? Shortly after the
Should MPs be allowed second jobs? In the wake of last year’s Owen Paterson scandal, in which it was revealed the Tory MP had breached lobbying rules, there was a clamour to clamp down on Parliamentarians’ outside income. The Commons Standards Committee toyed with the idea of placing some restriction on the time MPs could spend on extra-Parliamentary
A couple of weeks ago Ursula von der Leyen portentously announced a further package of EU sanctions against Russia – the sixth, in case you had lost count. No doubt an underling immediately told Vladimir Putin. Most likely, that adviser will have been waved away; Vladimir has more important matters to think about. Much of
Amnesty International and Stonewall are no strangers to criticising the government. This week they’ve been at it again: blasting Dominic Raab’s plans to make adjustments to the Human Rights Act by replacing it with a British Bill of Rights. But they are wrong to attack an approach that most Brits will realise is perfectly sensible. Raab’s
