Over at the FT (££) is an elegant piece by David Allen Green on the legal/constitutional steps that would be expected following a Brexit vote. Key point: A vote for Brexit will not be determinative of whether the UK will leave the EU. That potential outcome comes down to the […]
Here is my piece on UK/EU/Brexit that’s just gone up over at Huffington Post: … our decisions today are part of bigger trends, even if in all the noise it’s hard to spot them. Here are three. First, the European Union is like every other attempted pan-European project of the […]
You don’t have to go far in the seething Brexit debate to find that ‘migration’ is a Big Deal, not least as the Labour/Guardian side of the argument smells its own panic. Thus this: Ed Balls’s latest intervention in the EU debate is striking. In today’s Daily Mirror, the former […]
Here’s my latest article for DIPLOMAT magazine – available via their website. Thus: These days far too few Ambassadors are distinguished (or even undistinguished) poets. In 1845 James Russell Lowell wrote the hymn Once to Every Man and Nation to protest America’s war with Mexico. Virtue was duly rewarded and […]
A substantial part of the Brexit case is the simple idea that the European Union has ‘gone too far’. Too big, too clumsy, too intrusive, too undemocratic – in short, too much. Oddly enough in the UK debate both Leave and Remain warmly agree on this. No serious British Remain […]
Continuing from my previous post. It follows that the EU is a stupendously good idea, right? Peace, love, understanding – all neatly codified via mutual treaty networks for the benefit of EU member states’ citizens. In fact it’s such a fine idea that other regions of the world are planning […]
Basically, there are only questions in politics: Who decides? Who decides who decides? (These folk ultimately set all the rules and are the final operational source of legitimacy and authority – see Kelsen’s famous hierarchy of norms) This is what ‘national sovereignty’ is all about. Does your state have its […]
My former FCO colleague the legendary Alyson Bailes alas has died, at the age of 67. Here is her Guardian obituary quoting Sir Kim Darroch: Her flair for languages was remarkable. She spoke and read French, Hungarian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish at what she herself described as […]
Readers’ whose brains glaze over when trying to work out the acronymic difference between the European Union, the European Economic Area (EEA) and the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) may find this piece over at the Adam Smith Institute helpful (h/t Roland Smith). It looks at the Big Picture (emphasis […]
Here is a good piece by Tony E about that grim Newsnight programme on Monday: Charles Crawford is a former diplomat, noted for his work in the Eastern Bloc both before and after the fall of Soviet Union. He knows a thing or two about negotiations, was a senior figure […]
