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Tomorrow, Parliament votes – yet again – on whether to accept the latest Brexit withdrawal agreement, put together at the last minute after Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, agreed to key concessions (yes, he blinked first). Over three years after the EU referendum, the choice still facing the country is the deal (as revised), no deal, […]
Brexit campaigners often claim that the EU isn’t democratic. But in many ways, it’s more democratic than our system of democracy in the UK where: We have an unelected second chamber. We have an unelected head of state (who has no real power to intervene on important issues). We have an old-fashioned voting system of […]
Britain may be an island, but we are part of a continent and a planet. And it’s only by countries working closely together that urgent issues such as climate change can be effectively tackled. What’s the alternative? That Britain retreats into an island mentality, thinking we can go it alone as if we were the […]
Across Europe, across the world, they’re getting mightily fed up and cheesed-off with Britain. Nobody knows what we want. Almost three years after the referendum, nobody has a clue what Brexit really means. They used to look up to Britain. They used to regard us as a stabilising influence. We provided balance, maturity, rationality. No […]
The European Union consists of 28 member states. All treaty changes or enlargement of the EU require the unanimous consent of every single member, however large or small. The Union of the United Kingdom consists of four member states: England, Scotland, Wales and the province of Northern Ireland. In the referendum, two of them voted […]
Next year, the UK will be the only EU member ever to leave. No other countries are leaving. On the contrary, more countries are queuing to join. In the EU, Britain and Britons have a say and a vote on the running and the future direction of our continent. Every five years, we’ve been able […]
The European Union consists of 28 member states. All treaty changes or enlargement of the EU require the unanimous consent of every single member, however large or small. The Union of the United Kingdom consists of four member states: England, Scotland, Wales and the province of Northern Ireland. In the referendum, two of them voted […]
In Berlin this week our Brexit Secretary, David Davis, attempted to give a lecture to the Germans. “Don’t put politics above prosperity,” he said. That seems rich as the ideology of Brexit means doing exactly that: putting politics above the prosperity of Britain. But there were other oxymorons in Mr Davis’s speech. He said he […]
Whilst the UK’s assessments on the impact of Brexit are shrouded in secrecy, the European Parliament has already openly published an assessment of the impact of Brexit on the remaining 27 EU member states. The European Parliament commissioned the independent report on the economic impact of Brexit and it was published last March without any […]
One of my biggest frustrations on watching BBC TV’s ‘Question Time’ is that when UKIP representatives make incorrect statements about the EU, there’s usually nobody on the panel or in the audience to correct them. Take last Thursday’s broadcast of Question Time. Among those appearing on the panel was UKIP MEP, Patrick O’Flynn, who made […]
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