Eu

The UK never tried to have our constitution written in one big session. We made it up by responding to each crisis when it happened. Brexit is just the latest. The remaining sticking points on a deal are fish and something called the level playing field. Fish is very interesting, I assume, but it is politics, not law. So, as a lawyer who chooses not to speak on politics (some do), fish is none of my business. But the Level Playing Field (LPF) – which is a legal problem – is. It is the elephant in the room. And yet the EU’s response to this issue is deeply unhelpful. Rightly

Given the seemingly highly technical nature of the current negotiations, members of the public who have normal lives to lead might be forgiven for thinking that the same issues are still being debated after more than four years. They might be forgiven for thinking this as much of the media, including the BBC, are happy simply to parrot the official line coming from Brussels: that this is just about compromise, both sides making necessary adjustments, and the EU simply acting in a normal and rational way. Rational it may be. Normal it is not. The EU is being rational in ruthlessly pursuing its own interests. But it is entirely abnormal

The upshot of Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen’s conversation this evening is that the pair will meet in Brussels in the ‘coming days’ to see if they can resolve the remaining ‘significant differences’ on the level playing field, governance and fish. Presumably this meeting will take place before the European Council on Thursday. Johnson and von der Leyen are being left with a lot to resolve in their summit. This isn’t going to be simply about finding a compromise on fish but on sorting the three issues that have bedevilled the negotiations from the start. Optimists will point to how negotiations on the withdrawal agreement last year seemed

That France was the country to throw a grenade threatening to blow up the UK-EU trade talks just as they were about to pass the finish line, does not come as a surprise to seasoned euro-watchers. No other EU member would so brazenly promote its own domestic self-interest at the cost to other EU members such as Germany and Ireland. To the British it has echoes of de Gaulle saying ‘non’, when vetoing the UK’s first attempts to join the Common Market. Many of the EU’s problems and (in my view) the ultimate reason Brexit happened, is down to a fundamental cause that is little remarked on in the UK.

Lorries will be backed up across Kent. The shops will run short of essential goods. Travel plans will be disrupted, and factories will start to close as British goods are shut out of their main export markets. As the UK comes to the end of its transitional deal with the EU, and as talks on a trade agreement appear to have reached an impasse, there will be plenty of high-stakes brinkmanship, and pressure on the government to give some ground on fishing and regulation to avoid the potential chaos of no deal. And yet in truth, if Boris Johnson caves into the EU’s demands at the last moment, the voters

Six years ago, at the celebratory opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely football star emerged. The red team’s ageing, six-foot tall centre-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal; a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he expected to become his country’s 12th president. For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world record’ Yangtze River swim at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make

With the UK looking likely to exit transition in December without a trade deal, there has been plenty of coverage of what life outside the bloc will mean for Britain. There has been rather less coverage of what we have avoided by virtue of having left the EU. Yesterday came one of the first big EU agreements to which the UK has not been party: the latest reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In typical fashion, it resulted in a fudge engineered by powerful lobbyists and which will guarantee vast sums of public money going to waste. The whole point of the latest round of CAP reform was that it was

Downing Street now thinks that the chances of a Brexit deal are down to 30 or 40 per cent, I say in The Times today. The sticking point is, rather surprisingly, state aid. Since Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, the UK has been sniffy about the idea of government ‘picking winners’. It doesn’t use much state aid (less than half the EU average, according to the Commission’s figures), but the Johnson government doesn’t want to commit itself to something similar to the EU’s regime – it wants to use the power of the state to develop what it sees as the industries of the future. One figure with intimate knowledge of the

Anyone who imagined that the departure of Britain would make for more harmonious EU summits in future will have been disabused of this belief by the four days of meetings to establish an EU coronavirus recovery fund, which came within an hour of being the longest on record. Agreement was reached on a €750 billion package — just over half of which will be made up of grants and the rest loans — but not before the French President, Emmanuel Macron, had reportedly thumped the table and accused a group of countries of putting the entire European project at risk through their refusal to sign for an even higher sum.

Politics begins and ends with sovereignty: the duty and right to make the legitimate final decision. We have seen this clearly during the pandemic. In every country, people have come to depend on their governments, whose authority rests on acknowledged sovereignty. This is as true, or even truer, in democracies: while monarchs and aristocrats could dispute sovereignty – and, where it suited them, divide up the cake amongst themselves – in a democracy there can only be one ultimate sovereign: the people. No sovereignty, no democracy. For years we have been told the illusion, if not a fraud, that sovereignty can be ‘pooled’. Who takes the final decision when sovereignty

The old division of leaver and remainer will not serve the best interests of the country as we go forward. That truth might be emotionally hard to accept, but it will remain true. We need now to adapt to the real challenges the future holds. One of the most pressing is our future relationship with the EU – and that is being negotiated again on Monday. I have written on how we should support the EU given the recent judgment of the German Constitutional Court on the question of the European Central Bank bond scheme. The case is complicated and while I enjoy a good legal fight over complex financial

It will receive €9 billion (£8 billion) in free money from the government. It will be protected from any threat of a takeover. And, with a restored balance sheet, it will be free to make predatory acquisitions across the continent. It is of course Lufthansa, the German airline, which has just been given a massive package of financial support by its government. But hold on. Isn’t there meant to be a level playing field across Europe? Over the course of the negotiations on a trade deal with the European Union, we have had a series of high-handed lectures from Michel Barnier demanding the UK sign up to EU oversight of