Brexit

Tuesday

Ed West

In defence of small nation states

Scotland may have a second referendum within three years, as many Remainers correctly predicted. If the British government makes a mess of Brexit, the Scots may be inclined to leave the sinking ship and rejoin the EU. If Britain succeeds in going it alone outside a larger federation and doesn't suffer a huge economic setback then perhaps the Scots might think they can do so too. I'm rather inclined to believe that neither the UK or the EU will necessarily be around as this century matures, and it won't be the economic or emotional catastrophe people imagine. Sad though it would be to see ane end of ane auld sang, Scotland would do fine as an independent nation. They gave the world Adam Smith, after all.

Monday

Steerpike

UK consumer confidence hits five-year high as Brexit bounce continues

Another day, another piece of embarrassing data for those who predicted that the Brexit vote would trigger an immediate recession. Their foundation was based on the belief that confidence would plunge. As things turn out the Deloitte Consumer tracker has hit an all-time high. It has only been running for five years, so the real story could be even more impressive. And while George Osborne was talking about half a million jobs going as a result of the Brexit vote, the Deloitte survey found a strong increase in confidence of job security, up from -10 per cent to -4 per cent. [caption id="attachment_9651592" align="alignnone" width="560"] Source: Deloitte[/caption] And how does this compare with what was being said about consumer confidence before the vote?

Sunday

Roger Bootle & John Mills

Why we should celebrate the fall of the pound – and keep it low

The fall of the pound has been the political event of the week, but is it all bad news? Many thanks to Civitas for allowing us to republish the below essay, an extract from a pamphlet (pdf) about the merits of a low currency and case for keeping the pound at its new competitive levels.  Many people in the market and much of the commentariat are currently concerned with the recent weakness of the pound on the exchanges. They are barking up the wrong tree. The real sterling crisis is that the pound has been too high. Accordingly, the Brexit-inspired bout of sterling weakness was extremely good news for the British economy.

James Forsyth

Will Brexit butcher the banks? | 16 October 2016

The financial crisis defines our age. It helps explain everything from the presidential nomination of Donald Trump to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party after 30 years on the political fringe. Certainly, the Brexit vote wouldn’t have happened without it. The crash of 2008 created a sense of unfairness that is still roiling our politics, as well as calling into question the competence of the West’s ruling class. The soi disant ‘experts’ were easily dismissed during the EU referendum campaign because nearly all of them had got the economic crisis so wrong. The Brexiteers asked: why should the public listen to the arguments of organisations and businesses that had made such disastrous misjudgments?

Saturday

James Forsyth

Britain shouldn’t stay in the customs union after Brexit

A Brexit deal that would end free movement and see UK goods able to access the EU market without tariffs or the need to jump through any additional hoops sounds, superficially, attractive. These arrangements could also be in place by the 2020 general election, as I say in my Sun column. But this idea of leaving the EU single market, but staying in the customs union is a bad one—however keen some in the Treasury and Whitehall are on it. For if Britain remains in the customs union, then it can’t do proper trade deals with non-EU countries. Instead, it will have to continue to apply the EU’s Common External Tariff. This is designed to protect the EU’s most politically sensitive industries: imposing a 10 percent tariff on cars, an 11.

Rod Liddle

Theresa May is Blue Labour at heart

I never really agreed with the central-thesis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that ‘42’ is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I have no great animus against the number — it does its job, filling that yawning gap between 41 and 43. But I had never thought it actually-special until the beginning of this week. That’s when I read that the Conservative Party was 17 points ahead in the latest opinion polls, on 42 per cent. A remarkable figure. I suppose you can argue that it says more about the current state of the Labour party than it does about Theresa May’s stewardship of the country.

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Emily Thornberry’s calamitous Question Time appearance

Emily Thornberry put in a memorable performance on Question Time last night. Unfortunately for the shadow foreign secretary, it was an appearance that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. Thornberry was heckled after sucking up to Corbyn, and she managed to make the audience groan when she claimed what united Labour was ‘so much more than what divides us’ (Mr S suspects there are many Labour MPs who might disagree with that view). Thornberry also tried to claim Labour were more grown-up than the Tories, saying her party fought ‘in the press’ rather than ‘in closed rooms’. But she saved her biggest clanger for when she was talking about Brexit.

Ross Clark

Boris’s Royal Yacht obsession shows his weakness for vanity projects

I would like to think that the lack of obvious progress on negotiating a post-Brexit deal with the EU is, as Theresa May said this week, part of a strategy – that there is a lot going on behind the scenes but it is not in our interests for the Government to give a ‘running commentary’ on it. But listening to the foreign secretary speaking before the Commons foreign affairs committee I am beginning to wonder. Maybe, actually nothing is going on. Top of Boris’s ‘to do’ list, it seems, is not securing trade deals with the world beyond the EU. It is securing himself a royal yacht on which he can then swan around the world - perhaps doing a trade deal or two on the way.

Joanna Williams

What the increase in hate crime really tells us about post-Brexit Britain

It’s official: there is 41 per cent more hatred in Britain now than there was before the vote to quit the EU. Home Office statistics out this week reveal the torrent of religious and racist fury that was unleashed on June 23rd. Only a reversal of the democratic will of the people can possibly save us now. Really? We all need to calm down. The recently invented and chillingly Orwellian concept of ‘hate crime’ tells us absolutely nothing about the state of the post-referendum, pre-Brexit nation. Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.’ In other words, hate crime statistics are a record of hurt feelings.

Tom Goodenough

Nicola Sturgeon is caught in an independence referendum fix

Nicola Sturgeon is in a bit of a fix. After saying that the Scottish independence referendum was a once-in-a-generation event she is calling for a second one just two years after the first. But polls show Scots have no appetite for this vote. Unlike the SNP activist base, which is itching for another fight – and there have even been signs of a Momentum-style infiltration of the SNP, raising the prospect of a split in a party whose strength has (hitherto) been in its discipline. So what’s the First Minister to do? Her answer, in the SNP conference, is to assuage the activists and publish a new referendum bill. Her peg is the Brexit vote, and her shtick is simple.

Constance Watson

Thank goodness ‘Marmitegate’ is over

Back in the halcyon days of EU membership, a case for 'Remain' was presented upon these very pages. It explored the potentially disastrous consequences of Brexit on our meals. We toyed with the threat of turning our backs on claret, kissing confit de canard goodbye, and bidding farewell to champagne after 23 June. But in my shortsightedness, and in my greed, I failed to predict that Brexit would mark the funeral march of Marmite. Which it nearly did. Despite a day of utter hysteria, unalloyed panic and bulk buying, #Marmitegate is over. Thank God. To be fair to Brexit, and all who voted for it, no one could have predicted the threat of extinction of our beloved breakfast spread. But lo, the threat came - and what a threat it was.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 October 2016

Against all odds, I almost got through an entire Brexit dinner with dignity, and without opening the valve in my head which allows hot steam to escape. Almost. Our little Leave Means Leave campaign soiree at a restaurant in Birmingham was going swimmingly until a TV journalist drew up a chair and within seconds started berating one of the guests, a government minister, for not giving a cast iron assurance now that every foreigner living in Britain can stay once we leave the EU. ‘Oh go on! Can’t you just let everyone stay?’ he pleaded with the minister, who was trying to eat his sea bass. ‘I mean, these are real people, you know, real families.’ Naturally, as stupid Leave campaigners, we had all thought they were pretend families.

The Spectator

Universities challenged

On the face of it, this year’s Nobel Prize awards have been a triumph for British scientists. No fewer than five laureates come from these shores: three physicists, one chemist and an economist. But before anyone starts praising our higher education system, there is one small snag: all five are currently working at US universities. David Thouless, who was awarded half the Physics prize, has followed a typical career path. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he took a PhD at Cornell University and a postdoc at the University of California before heading back to Britain, where he worked for 13 years at the University of Birmingham. There, he started the work that would eventually win him his Nobel prize.

Ross Clark

Tesco finally meets its match

Only in the bizarre, upside-down, post-Brexit referendum world could Tesco try to portray itself as a victim of bullying by one of its suppliers. Isn’t Tesco supposed to be the nasty corporation which ruthlessly uses its might to squash the people who produce the goods which line its shelves? What about all those farmers, dairies and small-time cookie-makers apparently given a tough time by hard-nosed buyers at Tesco, who always want everything cheaper and for payment terms to be stretched out ever longer? I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for Tesco – I’m certainly not sobbing over my Marmite sandwiches – but the reality is that yes, the supermarket really has met its match.

Alex Massie

Nicola Sturgeon’s cherished Brexit grievance rears its head

Politics is a question of priorities. Push always comes to shove and that's when you discover what a party really thinks is important. We've seen this repeatedly this year. The Labour party, for instance, has decided power is for other people. And the Conservative party has decided that leaving the European Union is something worth risking the Union for. If we have to break-up the United Kingdom to save the United Kingdom, then so be it. A price worth paying, you know. But don't pretend you weren't warned about this. Because you were. Repeatedly. There's a reason, you know, why Ruth Davidson and most of her Holyrood colleagues campaigned for a Remain vote. They could see what was coming down the pipe in the event of a vote to Leave.

Tom Goodenough

The battle for Brexit moves to the High Court

More than 17 million people voted for Brexit. Yet for some, that mandate isn’t quite enough. Today, the High Court is hearing a legal challenge on whether the Government should be allowed to pull the Article 50 trigger without the direct say-so of Parliament. The Commons might have spent hours debating Brexit over the last few days but for Gina Miller - the fund manager bringing the High Court case - only another vote will do. Here's what she said on the Today show explaining her argument: 'It’s actually very simple, our case is that this is a fundamental constitutional case saying that parliament and parliament alone can take away rights. The Government can not use this ancient secretive royal prerogative to do so.’ But is Miller just a bad loser?

Fraser Nelson

Jolly good show

It’s tempting for a Brit to look over the Atlantic and smugly conclude that, after 240 years, the American experiment of self government has failed — that this ingenious country could not even find two decent people to run for the White House, and has instead laid on a political freak show that’s best watched from behind the sofa. British politics has its faults, we say, but we’re nowhere near as bad as that. But who would be bold enough to say that had Andrea Leadsom not dropped out of the race, Tory members would not have voted her in? And looking at the House of Commons, can we really say that it’s functional? We have no opposition to speak of, thanks to the crisis in the Labour party.

James Forsyth

Will Brexit butcher the banks?

The financial crisis defines our age. It helps explain everything from the presidential nomination of Donald Trump to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party after 30 years on the political fringe. Certainly, the Brexit vote wouldn’t have happened without it. The crash of 2008 created a sense of unfairness that is still roiling our politics, as well as calling into question the competence of the West’s ruling class. The soi disant ‘experts’ were easily dismissed during the EU referendum campaign because nearly all of them had got the economic crisis so wrong. The Brexiteers asked: why should the public listen to the arguments of organisations and businesses that had made such disastrous misjudgments?

Nick Cohen

May’s head on the block

Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away with it, and you will see it is reconstituting the oldest and dirtiest alliance in Tory-history: the alliance between snobs and mobs. I accept it takes a while to see our new rulers for what they are. Theresa May represents the dormitory town of Maidenhead. Although Eton College is just a few miles down the Thames valley, she could not be further socially and intellectually from David Cameron’s public school chumocracy. As for inciting mobs, what more ridiculous charge could I level against her? May seems to have no need to incite anyone. The far left has destroyed the opposition so thoroughly it will take Labour a generation to recover.

Nicholas Farrell

The road to the Jungle

 Calais On Sunday evening a British motorist, Abraham Reichman, 35, from Stamford Hill, north London, hit two Eritrean migrants who were trying to block the A16 outside Calais. They had leapt in front of his car, he says, as he slowed down to avoid dozens of migrants on the motorway. Terrified, Mr Reichman drove off at speed to the police station, where he later found out that one of the Eritreans had died. The police released him after several hours but he is under investigation for homicide involontaire. It is not difficult to meet migrants so determined to get to the land of milk and honey on the British side of the English Channel that they are prepared to risk their lives and put those of drivers in mortal danger.