Eu

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Are Boris’s admirers prepared to have their hearts broken?

When I was 18, I had my first tutorial on Anglo-Saxon history. I cannot remember the details but the don talked of the king of Mercia, or some such, marrying his daughter to the son of the king of Northumbria, or somewhere or other, because of the political advantages the union would bring the two crowns. The teenage Cohen listened appalled. ‘You mean,’ I cried, ‘they didn’t love each other?’ In a voice so acid, it might have burnt through the hull of a battleship, the don hissed: ‘I do not subscribe to the Mills & Boon school of British history.’ After that encounter, I stopped subscribing too. Views of

Sunday

Steerpike

Vote Leave exec accuses Alan Duncan of asking for a board position before backing Remain

This week Sir Alan Duncan penned a piece for the Telegraph entitled ‘why this lifelong Eurosceptic is now voting to stay in’. In this, the Conservative MP explained the reasons he is backing Remain. To show how torn he had been over the decision, Duncan revealed that he had even met with Vote Leave ahead of opting to join the In camp: ‘I am one of those who many expected in the referendum campaign to be a fervent advocate of leaving. Until recently I also expected it of myself – even going so far as to speak to the Leave organisers at their HQ.’ However, Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott has put forward

Ross Clark

In defence of Boris Johnson

It is good that Matthew Parris has taken on Boris. The Mayor has had too easy a press in many quarters. There is a good reason for this: he is one of us. There is a bit of the Bullingdon in Fleet Street: we are often too disinclined to attack our own. Matthew Parris acknowledges this, and the vitriolic nature of his Times column on Saturday is an attempt to redress the balance. But for me, my objection is not that Matthew has gone over the top in his attack on Boris – it is that his line of attack is fundamentally wrong. The same is true of Nick Cohen’s

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Can the ‘leave’ campaign convince British farmers that they’d be better off out?

As Nigel Farndale wrote in this magazine in February, leaving the EU would have a dramatic effect on British farmers and the agricultural industry. When it comes to British agriculture, the EU very much sets the rules – with regards to both regulations and funding – so a vote for Brexit would mean change, in a big way.   But what makes the EU debate even more interesting when it comes to farming is that the farming minister – George Eustice – has placed himself firmly in the ‘out’ camp. Eustice, after all, was once a Ukip candidate in the European Parliament Elections, and was Campaign Director for the No

Charles Moore

Viva Obama! Viva Fidel! Viva Jean-Claude Juncker!

In Cuba, they are shouting: ‘¡Viva Obama! Viva Fidel!’ What a slogan. The FT headline ignorantly described this as a ‘Nixon in China’ moment: implying that Obama had previously been opposed to Castro’s Cuba. The US President is expected to come to Britain next month to order us to stay in the EU. Let us strew his way with palms. Let all of us — workers, peasants and soldiers — shout with one voice ‘¡Viva Obama! Viva Jean-Claude Juncker!’ This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article can be found here. 

Steerpike

Listen: Justin Webb takes Amber Rudd to task on Today over her ‘plague of frogs’ Brexit claims

Today Amber Rudd is doing her bit for the In campaign with a speech in which she will warn the nation that UK energy costs could ‘rocket’ by £500 million a year if Britain were to vote to leave the European Union. The Energy and Climate Change Secretary will also claim that leaving the EU would mean that President Putin could raise the price of Russian gas and in turn cause energy chaos for Britain. To discuss the claims, Rudd — whose brother Roland is the treasurer of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign — appeared on the Today show with Justin Webb. Unfortunately for Rudd, Webb had done his research when it came

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 March 2016

PC and abortion Sir: It is heartwarming that Simon Barnes’s son should not suffer the stigma experienced by those with Down’s syndrome in earlier generations (‘In praise of PC’, 19 March). But is it not ironic that in this kinder, more generous and respectful age, over 90 per cent of fetuses diagnosed with Down’s are aborted? Rather than hiding the children away, we now ensure that most of them are not even born. If political correctness had really become sane, surely our kindness, generosity and respect would extend to the womb as well? Matthew Hosier Poole, Dorset Naming conditions Sir: Simon Barnes, makes a couple of assumptions which do not

Julie Burchill

Feminists for Brexit

For decades — even before it had its name, which sounds thrilling, as words with an X in them tend to — I’ve been a Brexiter. I even mistrusted the Common Market, as we called the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll before it showed us the deformed, power-crazed face of the EU’s Mr Hyde. The adored MP of my childhood, Tony Benn, preached against it in any shape or form. ‘When I saw how the European Union was developing,’ he said, ‘it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don’t

Theodore Dalrymple

Why we need migrants

This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is. A migrant is not just a migrant, of course. Indeed, to speak of migrants in general is to deny them agency or even characteristics of their own, to assume that they are just units and that their fate depends only on how the receiving country receives them and not at all on their own motives, efforts or attributes, including their

Saturday

James Forsyth

George Osborne should have gone to the Foreign Office after the election

Imagine how different politics would be now if George Osborne had moved to the Foreign Office after the election. He would have left the Treasury with his economic and political strategy vindicated by the election result and wouldn’t be involved in this deeply damaging row with Iain Duncan Smith. For Osborne to have a former leader, and one of the most respected figures among the party activists, attacking his whole approach to deficit reduction and his conception of fairness is politically disastrous, to put it mildly. The problem for Osborne is that with no fiscal wriggle room and his opponents on the Tory benches determined to cause him trouble at every

Friday

Camilla Swift

Are Anders Breivik’s human rights really being contravened, or is it simply attention seeking?

Anders Behring Breivik – the Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in 2011 – has for the last few days been involved in a human rights trial in his prison in the south of Norway. Many would argue that, for a person in jail, he has a fairly cushy life – particularly given his crime. He is allowed to play video games, read newspapers and have access to a computer, and also has access to three cells, as well as an outside area. He has also been allowed to take university courses at the country’s main university, the University of Oslo, and took part in the prison’s Christmas gingerbread-baking competition.

Steerpike

Jo Johnson on the debate dividing the nation: ‘it’s brother against brother’

While Boris Johnson is firmly behind the Out campaign in the EU referendum, his father Stanley, sister Rachel and brother Jo are all backing Remain. So, has the difference in opinion led to any family conflict? Last night at a French embassy Jo — the minister for science and universities —  appeared at first to hint at such problems. He gave a speech, which he began in French, on the great row now gripping the nation and tearing families apart: ‘Everybody must declare their position. Families are divided; brother against brother… I speak of course of the crucial debate for the French language; whether or not to abandon the circumflex.’ Johnson went on

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Amber express

Amber Rudd isn’t a flashy politician; her office at the Department for Energy and Climate Change has almost no personal touches. She has a poster on the wall for the new Edinburgh tram (she was a student there). Her one concession to vanity is a framed ‘Minister of the Year’ award from this magazine: awarded for uprooting the legacy of the Liberal Democrat energy policy and being (in the words of the commendation) the ‘slayer of windmills’. It was, perhaps, an exaggeration: she hasn’t brought down any of Britain’s 5,215 onshore wind turbines. But she has been busy pruning back the green subsidies that her department had become used to

Yvo Fitzherbert

Desperate straits

 Istanbul Shops in a rundown neighbourhood sell fake life jackets to refugees planning to brave the Aegean Sea. Last year, nearly 4,000 refugees died trying to make this journey. ‘But what am I to do?’ says Erkan, a shopkeeper, as he pushes me out of his shop. ‘I tell them they are fake but the poor souls continue to buy them. The genuine ones don’t sell so well.’ We’re in the suburb of Aksaray, the makeshift centre of the smuggling trade in the city. Here the language is Arabic and the restaurants are Syrian. A town square serves as a hub for migration brokers. This is where dreams are sold.

Ian Buruma

Vote for freedom!

One of the most appealing arguments for Brexit is that it will make British citizens freer than they are now. The greatness of Great Britain lies, after all, in its long history of relative freedom. But now, so the proponents of Brexit like to claim, Britain is shackled by the tyranny of the EU, as though ‘Brussels’ were some alien dictatorship in which Britain plays no part. Columnists huff that Britain is now just a colony of this ‘foreign superpower’. That the EU exists as a superpower would come as news to most people in Brussels — and everywhere else. The European Union has no army and no joint foreign

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Cameron’s support for Turkey’s EU membership should worry us all

David Cameron this morning claimed that people who wish to leave the EU are ‘taking a risk with people’s jobs, taking a risk with families’ finances.’ Well then let us consider an even bigger risk that David Cameron is taking. In a visit to Turkey in 2010 our own Prime Minister announced that he would do everything he could to ensure Turkey entered the EU. Speaking as a guest of the country’s Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our own PM said, ‘Turkey deserves its place at the top table of European politics – and that is what I will fight for.’ Since then he has indeed been fighting to

Ed West

Is more multiculturalism really the cure for the EU’s problems?

Germany is on its feet again; the country’s answer to Ukip, Alternative Für Deutschland, made huge gains at the polls, winning a presence in three state assemblies. The shadow of Auschwitz looms over all European politics on the subject of immigration and race, but obviously more so in Germany, and many people are worried. Their growth in popularity may have something to do with the chancellor’s decision to invite one million and counting people from the wider Middle East, in an gesture historians will probably see as the grandest act of folly of early 21st century history. Some people are worried that, along with FN, Ukip and Trump, AfD are

Monday

Rod Liddle

Even the Germans are starting to despair of their country’s migrant policy

A rather impressive performance by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s regional elections. Second in Saxony-Anhalt and double digit percentages in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate. Today’s papers have tended to conclude that despite AfD’s shock success, the elections were nonetheless a triumph, of sorts, for Angela Merkel’s policy towards migrants, if not for her party, the CDU. I can’t say that I see it like that. For a party which did not exist four years ago to take a quarter of the votes in one lander is a remarkable expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add into that the fact AfD is held in some suspicion as being exclusively middle-class, if not

Irwin Stelzer

Don’t listen to Obama – real Americans want Brexit

Because Americans love Britain, and because we are a presumptuous lot, we often advise the United Kingdom on its foreign policy. And not only the UK, but Europe. Successive US administrations have urged European nations to form a United States of Europe as an answer to the question attributed to Henry Kissinger: ‘Who do I call if I want to call Europe?’ The latest such unrequested advice was offered to your Prime Minister by no less a foreign-policy maven — see his successes in Libya, Middle East, China, Crimea — than Barack Obama. The outgoing president informed David Cameron that his administration wants to see ‘a strong United Kingdom in

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Right-wing populists surge in Germany’s state elections

Angela Merkel continues to reap the whirlwind. In this weekend’s elections Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged as the fastest-growing political insurgent party since 1945. It has managed to enter all three state parliaments – with over 10pc of the vote in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and almost a quarter of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double the centre-left SPD. It focused its campaign as a protest against Merkel’s migrant policy, a policy that paid off. Its success is more than just another example of Europeans letting off steam. Imagine if Nigel Farage declared that police should be ready to shoot migrants trying to make it from Calais to Britain; saying: ‘I don’t want to do