Uk politics

Ministers don’t comment on leaked reports, as Theresa May said on the Today programme this morning, but they can jolly well make clear what they think of them, especially if those leaked reports are quite helpful to calming Conservative backbench grumbles. The Home Secretary didn’t distance herself from the leak in the Sunday Times that she wants a 75,000 cap on the number of EU migrants per year, and repeated David Cameron’s call for reform of freedom of movement, saying: ‘What the Prime Minister has said and what I said is that in looking at reform of the EU we need to look at this whole question of the arrangements

David Cameron’s declaration that prisoners “damn well shouldn’t” have the right to vote is a reminder that this issue hasn’t gone away. Cameron was emphatic that the final verdict on this question should rest with the British parliament not the European Court of Human Rights. But this is not the current situation as Cameron admitted with his line that “we need to clip [the court’s] wings”. But it is hard to see how Cameron can do that while keeping Britain under the jurisdiction of the court. The attempt to reform the court that Ken Clarke launched as Justice Secretary didn’t get very far. So, it is hard to see what

What would the exit negotiations look like if Britain voted to leave the EU? Well, Open Europe tried to give us an idea today hosting a war game sketching out what would happen next. (Seb wrote about their work on the renegotiation earlier). It left me with the view that there would be a second vote on the proposed exit terms. If Britain does vote out in a referendum, it is then—under Article 50—a member of the EU for two years while it tries to negotiate an exit deal. I suspect that the package would be, despite the UK’s trade surplus, relatively ungenerous. John Bruton, the former Irish Taoiseach and

David Lidington’s letter to Conservative Party members on ‘reform in Europe’ tells us not very much about almost nothing at all. It is measured, upbeat and polite, but that is the essential optimism and generous disposition of the man himself. The only interesting glimpse it offered into current thinking was confirmation of his ignorance of the Maastricht Treaty. Perhaps, like Kenneth Clarke, he hasn’t bothered to read it. The Europe Minister wrote: ‘I’m sure [members] will be pleased to know that in their Subsidiarity Review, the Dutch Government proposed a new principle: ‘at European level only when necessary, at national level whenever possible’.’ It isn’t clear if this ‘new principle’