Brexit

I have a question. How come when someone like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez funds themselves through small donations it’s a sign of how engaged and democratic they are, but when the Brexit Party does the same thing it’s proof of how sinister and shady that party is? I think we all know the answer to this question. It’s because the liberal elite is staggeringly hypocritical and now applies a double standard to everyone in politics. If you’re on their side, you’re pure and clean; if you’re on the opposite side, you’re dirty and ‘dark’.  This is the news that the Brexitphobic sections of the political and chattering classes have

Jeremy Corbyn – Labour supporters voted ‘both Leave and Remain’ With the European elections taking place next Thursday, several senior political figures took to the TV studios to reiterate their case, including a handful of party leaders. One of these was Jeremy Corbyn, whose Brexit position has been criticised for its lack of clarity. Speaking to Andrew Marr, Corbyn defended his strategy of not picking a side: JC: Labour supporters voted both Leave and Remain, and every other party in this European election is appealing to either one side or the other, defining everybody on 2016. We’re not. We’re defining people as hopefully supporters of us – but also, people who

Much has been made of the Brexit Party’s insurgency amongst people in Leave-voting communities, who have been subject to disparaging and patronising establishment contempt ever since they dared to vote the ‘wrong’ way in the EU referendum. But far less attention is given to the minority of Leave voters who work and live in the professions and other areas where support for Remain is the default position. One woman who approached the Brexit Party stall in Chester last week told me his: “I am a solicitor; my friend here is a physiotherapist and we are both fed up of being shunned by colleagues because we voted Leave. I just don’t

In a small town in the Black Country last night, a political rally took place which should have the two main parties feeling extremely nervous. Willenhall, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, doesn’t even have a train station. Yet well over a thousand supporters packed out a wedding venue to see the Brexit Party’s latest rally, filling every seat, standing in the aisles and exhibiting a greater enthusiasm than has been seen in British politics since the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. The Brexit Party launched only a few weeks ago but already this is looking like a movement which could have a profound effect on Britain’s politics. “I’ve never seen anything like this,”

Labour’s fence-sitting Sir: James Forsyth writes that Mrs May and Mr Corbyn are ‘not, in fact, that far apart’ (‘May’s compromising position’, 11 May). To many, the Labour left is simply playing its very old game of sitting on the fence over the EU. The electorate have spotted it, and Labour paid for it in the local elections. Some of us are old enough to remember Harold Macmillan’s withering mockery of the Labour attitude to the then Common Market in the early 1960s. It recalls the words of the old song: ‘She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no; she didn’t say stay and she didn’t say go!’ The

Oh dear. With Theresa May’s government seemingly on its last legs, it appears that party discipline has all but disappeared on the Conservative benches. The signs of discontent were clear at PMQs today when Tory MP and Brexiteer Peter Bone was given the chance to ask a question, but instead used the opportunity to pass on the views of his local Conservative members to the Prime Minister. Noting how they had been committed to the party for over twenty years and had been knocking on doors for the party ‘week in, week out’, Bone said that they now wanted a no-deal Brexit, and: ‘More importantly, they’ve lost confidence in the Prime

I have been fairly quiet for a bit because I have been struggling to say anything useful about what is going on – or perhaps, more accurately, what is not going on. You see we are living through, and in, the mother of all paradoxes: a time when everything and nothing is happening. On a day to day basis, little of moment takes place: Tory MPs huff and puff that Theresa May must be evicted from Downing Street but bicker about how and when she can be forced out. The prime minister and the leader of the opposition agree that people are fed up with all the Brexit uncertainty but

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe is once again at a crossroads. In 1989 and the years that followed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and Germany was unified. The newly independent, once Communist states – including my home country of Poland – embarked on the road to democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Poland was welcomed back into the European family, and we joined the ranks of Nato. But Europe now faces a threat to its hard-won unity. The threat can be seen in the imminent departure of the United Kingdom, violent protests in France, and the rise of insurgent political parties across the continent