Brexit

Jean-Claude Juncker is a ‘preposterous oaf’, according to the Sun. The paper says that, particularly on this side of the Channel, people shouldn’t care much about what he thinks. Yet ‘diehard Remainers’ continue to treat his word as gospel and ‘seize on Juncker’s every self-serving snippet as “evidence” of our Government’s failings’. Yes, there are some ‘reservations’ with how ministers are dealing with Brexit. But the papers published this month on Brexit by the Government actually look ‘eminently reasonable’ - a stark contrast from the ‘childish, posturing amateurs in Brussels’.

Is the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier actually serious about doing his job, wonders the Sun. In its editorial, the paper says that yesterday ‘yet another round’ of talks went by with hardly any progress. Once again, Barnier used the lack of any substance to complain. But the Sun is questioning whether this is all part of the plan: ‘The suspicion grows daily that Mr Barnier is hoping...to lengthen the impasse’, and that by doing so he'll force the government to back down - or hold out for a second referendum to put paid to Brexit for good. This approach shows a ‘contemptible disregard’ for British voters who backed Brexit, argues the Sun. Yet Barnier isn’t the only one to blame here.

A new word has entered the lexicon – Brexodus – to reflect the claim that Europeans are leaving in droves as they shun post-Brexit Britain. But it is a funny sort of Brexodus which leaves the number of European nationals in Britain at an all-time high. While the quarterly immigration figures did show a significant reduction in the scale of EU immigration to the UK, and a rise in the number of Europeans departing, those figures also showed that twice as many Europeans came to the UK as departed from it, with an estimated 122,000 EU nationals leaving the UK while 249,000 arrived in the year to March 2017. There have been significant changes to migration from eastern Europe.

For months, Labour has been moving ever closer to the Tory position on Brexit while pretending that it isn’t. First, it backed Brexit. Then in June, John McDonnell told Robert Peston that he couldn’t see continued membership of the single market being 'on the table' in Brexit negotiations. He added that people would interpret membership of the single market as 'not respecting that referendum.' In July, Jeremy Corbyn told Andrew Marr that single market membership is 'dependent on membership of the EU.' Barry Gardiner has even suggested that the UK would become a 'vassal state' if it were to remain in the single market after Brexit.

Spare a thought for David Davis over the bank holiday weekend. As revellers descend on Notting Hill Carnival on Monday, the Brexit Secretary will be at the negotiating table in Brussels for the third round of Brexit talks. With the EU 27 adamant that trade talks can only begin once progress has been made on the other issues, the focus will be on the Brexit 'divorce bill', the rights of EU nationals, and the Irish border. Given how uphill talks have been so far, the expectation in Whitehall is that this could be a bad-tempered outing for both sides. Michel Barnier – the EU’s chief negotiator – is expected to, once again, ask Davis to say how the UK proposes to calculate its financial obligations to the EU.

It has been a summer of tears, both of joy and sorrow. The latter first: how could stones not weep at the spectacle of this Gadarene government leading us towards the cliff edge with a show of insouciance on the part of Fox, Davis, Johnson that would be thought excessive at a wedding, never mind a funeral? At Daily Telegraph leader conferences 25 years ago, our young turks bewailed John Major’s government as the worst in history. Bill Deedes justly rebuked such hyperbole: ‘Are we really saying that Samuel Hoare was a better foreign secretary than Malcolm Rifkind?’ Today, however, it is hard to name a senior minister, with the possible exception of Philip Hammond, who seems to compare favourably with Hoare.

A key question in the Brexit talks is how any deal between the EU and UK will be upheld. The government has begun to address this today, publishing a paper on enforcement and dispute resolution. One thing is clear: ministers are committed to extricating the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In fact, the main point of the paper could be summed up as spelling out why Britain cannot agree to the ECJ being the arbiter of any Brexit deal. The government is entirely right about this. Sovereign states do not and should not enter into agreements in which the meaning and effect of the agreement is settled by the courts of the other party. The reason is obvious: one party would be at the mercy of the other.

There are plenty of theories about what led to the Brexit vote. Now, Al Gore, has a new one to add to the pile. The former vice president - who has been busy promoting his new film by labelling those who question him ’deniers’ - says the EU referendum result was brought about because of... climate change. Gore suggested that the war in Syria was caused by ‘climate refugees’ flooding into the cities. This, in turn, by Gore’s version of events at least, kickstarted the wider refugee crisis - eventually leading Brits to vote out last June. Here’s what Gore told the New European: ‘Long before the civil war in Syria began from 2006 to 2010 80% of livestock were killed by the drought, 60% of farms were destroyed, 1.