Eu

After yesterday’s furore over Treasury warnings about exactly what Brexit will cost British families, today it’s Michael Gove’s turn to hit back. The Justice Secretary is set to accuse the Government of ‘treating voters like children who can be frightened into obedience’. It’s extraordinary just how quickly the war of words seems to be intensifying, given that there are still more than nine weeks to go until the actual referendum. But is there a danger that all this noise is just going to switch off voters to the actual arguments being made? Michael Gove did his best this morning to make a clear-cut case for ditching the EU after being

George Osborne’s warning over what Brexit will cost the UK economy has dominated the headlines for much of the day. But how have the Treasury figures gone down in Westminster? Based on the number of Tory MPs queuing up to slam the Chancellor’s claims, it would seem not very well at all: Kwasi Kwarteng said he thought the figures were ‘absurd’. He attacked the Treasury as an organisation not qualified to make predictions about economic outcomes following its failure to predict the 2008 credit crunch: John Redwood also used the same word to describe his disdain for the warning that Brexit would cost British families £4,300. He said the predictions

Jeremy Corbyn’s eye-swivelling about-face on the EU – he once wanted to leave, now he wants to stay – has become a source of mirth for Eurosceptics and a sign of hope for Europhiles. To the anti-EU lobby, the fact that Corbyn voted against staying in the common market in the 1975 referendum and against EU treaties as an MP, yet now wants us all to vote to stay in, shows what a slippery character he is. For the Brussels-loving brigade it confirms that even the most heathen of EU haters can see the light. The ‘sinner who repents’ – actual words used in the Guardian‘s editorial on the newly

The US President flies into town next week to wish the Queen a happy 90th birthday and to encourage Britain to stay in the EU. Obama’s will be the most high profile, foreign intervention in this referendum yet. His message will be that it is in the interests of Britain, the US and the West for us to remain in the EU. But the Out campaign have their ‘Love Actually’ moment ready, as I say in my Sun column today. Boris Johnson will knock back Obama’s advice shortly after the president has spoken, pointing out—as he did in this BBC interview—that it is ‘nakedly hypocritical’ for the US to urge

A Middle Eastern friend put to me the other day a point so big that I felt silly for not having thought of it. Why are so many people fleeing from Syria and Iraq, and other parts of the region, beyond the huge, obvious reason that they fear for their lives? Because they believe that the Shias have gained the whip hand over the Sunnis. George Bush’s mishandling of Iraq after he conquered it opened the way for Iranian power. Barack Obama’s abandonment of Saudi Arabia, his refusal to restore order in Syria and his nuclear deal with Iran have erected this mistake into a policy. So one of this

An argument you sometimes hear from those sitting on the Brence (the Brexit fence) is that it’s a pity the EU couldn’t have stayed the same as it was when we first joined it in 1973. Back then, say the Brence-sitters, it was a trading bloc with only nine members, which made sense. Greece wasn’t a member, nor were Spain and Portugal, never mind Lithuania, Latvia and all those other countries ending in vowels. But if we could go back to that better arrangement — play fantasy politics, as it were — would we, with hindsight, want it to include France and Italy, two of the original nine? Their economies

The IMF has published one of the starkest warnings so far against Brexit from an organisation based outside of Britain. The latest set of figures from the International Monetary Fund predict that there will be a 0.3 percentage point dip in Britain’s growth forecast this year, as a result of the referendum. And the IMF warned that if Britain did vote to leave the EU, it could lead to ‘severe regional and global damage’. Both sides have used the statement to exchange in the latest round of tit-for-tat. George Osborne has said ‘for the first time, we’re seeing the direct impact on our economy of the risks of leaving the

David Cameron has defended the £9m government leaflet promoting the EU as ‘money well spent’ and ‘necessary’, as the Tory party erupts into fury once again. What’s interesting about this new row – over a leaflet sent to all homes which sets out ‘why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK’ – is that it has incensed not just those usual suspects who are annoyed that the Remain side already has a natural advantage in the referendum campaign in that it can wheel out the Prime Minister for guaranteed media attention whenever it likes. MPs who are on the

Sajid Javid is the driest and most Thatcherite member of the government. So, it is no surprise that he is — rightly, to my mind — rejecting calls for the nationalisation of the steel industry following Tata’s announcement that it plans to sell its UK steel-making business. But the steel issue has now got caught up in the EU referendum, with the Out side pointing out that EU state aid rules limit what the UK government can actually do to help the steel industry. Now, personally, I doubt that the government would want to do more even if it was allowed to. Yet, some ministers keep suggesting that the government