Migrants

Calm is slowly returning to the debate about Britain and Europe. The shrillness of the referendum campaign, and the hysteria from people who ought to have known better, is giving way to an acceptance that the end is not nigh and that things could be as good, if not better, than before. The idea that the British public had somehow voted for a recession is being steadily abandoned. The next stage is to accept that Brexit was not a populist yawp about protecting our borders. It was not a demand to stop immigration, but to manage it better. So when Theresa May rejected an Australian-style points-based immigration system this week,

 Stockholm For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in a suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden. Last week’s murder of eight-year-old Yuusuf Warsame fits a pattern that Swedes have come slowly to recognise over the years. He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community. Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence. Fraser Nelson and Ivar Arpi discuss the Swedish model for migration on this week’s Spectator podcast:

Home Two British men were charged with immigration offences after the rescue by night of 18 Albanian migrants, two of them children, from an inflatable boat off Dymchurch, Kent. ‘We don’t want the English Channel turning into the Mediterranean with fleets of small boats coming over,’ said Chris Grayling, the Leader of the House of Commons and a campaigner for Britain to leave the EU. Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, Boris Johnson MP and Gisela Stuart, a Labour backbencher, said in an open letter to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that the Conservative manifesto promise to reduce net immigration to ‘the tens of thousands’ was ‘plainly not achievable as long

Home The government published a Treasury analysis warning that an exit from the EU would plunge Britain into a year-long recession and could cost 820,000 jobs. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, speaking with George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at B&Q’s head office in Hampshire, said that leaving ‘would be like surviving a fall then running straight back to the cliff edge. It is the self-destruct option.’ Downing Street said that leaving the EU would make an average holiday for four people to the EU £230 more expensive. Gillian Duffy of Rochdale, the nemesis of Gordon Brown, the former Labour leader, spoke in favour of the Leave campaign. Ed

Home In the Budget, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept talking of the ‘next generation’. He outlined cuts of £3.5 billion in public spending by 2020, to be ‘on course’ to balance the books. Personal allowances edged up for lower taxpayers, with the higher-rate threshold rising to £45,000. A ‘lifetime Isa’ for under-40s would be introduced. Corporation tax would go down to 17 per cent by 2020. Small-business rate relief was raised: a ‘hairdresser in Leeds’ would pay none. Fuel, beer, cider and whisky duty would be frozen. To turn all state schools into academies (removing local authorities from education), he earmarked £1.5 billion. He gave the go-ahead

Home The Bank of England arranged for banks to be able to borrow as much money as they needed around the date of the EU referendum, lest there should be a bank run. After saying in a speech that Britain’s long-term prospects could be ‘brighter’ outside the EU, John Longworth was suspended as director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, from which he then resigned so that he could speak freely. Four arrests followed the explosion of a bomb in Belfast, which wounded a prison officer working at Maghaberry Prison near Lisburn in Co. Antrim. The law against smoking in public buildings does not apply to prisons in England and

Is there a genuinely independent go-to guide for anyone who cares about the future of the UK economy but isn’t sure how to cast their vote in the Brexit referendum? Two-thirds of voters are said by unreliable pollsters to have made up their minds already, which leaves at least a third undecided. As the strident rhetoric and tendentious factoids of the two campaigns intensify, the need for dispassionate analysis could not be greater. So it seems a good time to take counsel from one of the City’s wisest greybeards. Rodney Leach — Lord Leach of Fairford — did as much as anyone, as a leader of Business for Sterling, to