Category Archives: European Union

The EU is on the verge of collapse but could emerge from the current crisis stronger

George Soros writes: The post-referendum turmoil has highlighted for people in Britain just what they stand to lose by leaving the EU. If this sentiment spreads to the rest of Europe, what seemed like the inevitable disintegration of the EU could be instead creating positive momentum for a stronger and better Europe.

The process could start in Britain. The popular vote can’t be reversed but a signature collecting campaign could transform the political landscape by revealing a newfound enthusiasm for EU membership. This approach could then be replicated in the rest of the European Union, creating a movement to save the EU by profoundly restructuring it. I am convinced that as the consequences of Brexit unfold in the months ahead, more and more people will be eager to join this movement.

What the EU must not do is penalize British voters while ignoring their legitimate concerns about the deficiencies of the Union. European leaders should recognize their own mistakes and acknowledge the democratic deficit in the current institutional arrangements. Rather than treating Brexit as the negotiation of a divorce, they should seize the opportunity to reinvent the EU – making it the kind of club that the UK and others at risk of exit want to join.

If disaffected voters in France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Poland and everywhere else see the EU benefitting their lives, the EU will emerge stronger. If not, it will fall apart faster than leaders and citizens currently realize. [Continue reading…]

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After Brexit vote, immigrants feel a town turn against them

The New York Times reports: A few days after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Monika Baginski was in a supermarket, chatting with a friend on the phone in her native Polish, when a man followed her down the aisle. “You foreigner,” Ms. Baginski recalled him saying. “You’ll be out soon.”

Ms. Baginski, 32, said she was stunned. Until that moment, she had never been the target of abuse, even in Boston, a port town on the east coast of England where rancor between longtime residents and the fast-growing population of recent immigrants has been simmering for years.

But since Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union, latent hostility toward the new arrivals — most of whom came to Boston from Central and Eastern Europe under rules that let European Union citizens live and work anywhere in the bloc — has burst into the open, many immigrants say. Many in the Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Romanian communities in the area are anxiously considering whether they should stay in Britain, or whether they even want to.

“Something is broken in this town,” said Paul Gleeson, a Labour Party councilor in Boston, where 76 percent of voters supported leaving the European Union, the highest pro-“Brexit” proportion in the country. “This veneer of propriety has suddenly disappeared.’’

In this new environment, some immigrants say they have stopped speaking their native tongue in public. Nervous mothers say they worry about their children being bullied at school. Young immigrants say they fear discrimination over jobs and university admissions.

Gregory Pacho, who is Polish-Italian, runs a thriving taxi company. For the first time in the 16 years he has lived in Boston, he said, he has given serious thought to moving out, prompted by a leaflet on his car’s windshield that read, “Did you pack your bags yet?” [Continue reading…]

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Refugee who fled Boko Haram for Italy killed by ‘ultra’ football fan

The Guardian reports: A Nigerian refugee thought to have fled the terrorist group Boko Haram with his wife has died after being attacked by an “ultra” football fan in a small Italian town.

Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, 36, died of injuries he sustained when a local man, who had reportedly been racially abusing Namdi’s wife, attacked him in the town of Fermo, in central Italy.

Amedeo Mancini, 35, allegedly referred to the 24-year-old woman as a “monkey”, and attacked Namdi when he attempted to defend her, according to Italian media reports. Namdi fell into a coma and was pronounced dead on Wednesday.

Namdi and his wife, identified by her first name, Chimiary, were being hosted by Fermo town’s parish while they sought asylum. They are believed to have fled from Boko Haram and travelled through Niger and Libya before boarding a boat to Italy.

Father Vinicio Albanesi, who was hosting the couple, said they had previously lost a two-year-old daughter, and that Namdi’s wife suffered a miscarriage during the journey to Italy.

At an evening vigil on Wednesday, Chimiary cried out to her late husband: “Why do you leave me in this wicked world?” [Continue reading…]

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Brexit isn’t Trumpism

Sam Edwards writes: Donald Trump and the politicians who propelled Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union share many characteristics: a loose attachment to the truth, an ability to speak to those who feel disenfranchised by mainstream politics, and a willingness to row back on promises made just days or hours previously.

But while Trump is keen to paint Brexit as a mirror image of America’s disgust for the establishment, the Leave campaign was different from Trumpsim. The Leave campaign was not a personality cult  —  the fact that Michael Gove is even a contender for leadership is proof alone of that  —  but rather the direct beneficiary of regional and class disparities that have been brewing for decades.

Further, while Brexit was fought and won on immigration, the majority of those who voted to leave the E.U. are a long way from employing the openly racist language of Trump. The Leave camp is a ragtag coalition of libertarians, sovereigntists, and the far right, but it is the traditional Labour voters that swung the vote. Increasingly, they share Trump supporters’ antipathy for the political class, certainly, but the anti-immigrant sentiment of these Leave voters is in a comparatively embryonic stage, still largely a stand-in for the wider, less-tangible anger at decades of unemployment and social decay in parts of Britain that have never recovered from deindustrialization under Margaret Thatcher and have seen little benefit from globalization. The success of the right has been to lay the blame of six years of cuts to public services, wage stagnation, and soaring house prices squarely at the feet of immigrants and the E.U. [Continue reading…]

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The era of the angry voter is upon us

Der Spiegel reports: Paula Heap and Joel Coe live 6,400 kilometers apart. They don’t even know each other, but they share the same sense of outrage.

She voted for Brexit and he intends to vote for Donald Trump in November. She hails from Preston, a city in northwest England that never truly recovered from the decline of the textiles industry. He’s an American from the small town of Red Boiling Springs in northern Tennessee. His textiles factory, Racoe Inc., is the last of its kind still in business in the area.

It’s Heap’s view that globalization has created a lot of winners and a lot of losers, and that Preston is among the losers. She describes the EU as an “empire” that regulates her electric water kettle but doesn’t create any prosperity. She’s riled by the many immigrants, saying the pressure on the labor market and the health system is increasing. “We want to retain control over immigration,” she says.

Heap is a career advisor, whose motto could be “Make the UK great again,” to borrow a line from Donald Trump’s US presidential election campaign.

Coe, the Trump backer with bulky upper arms and a bushy, reddish beard, blames the NAFTA free trade agreement for the fact that jobs in his industry have been relocated from Tennessee to Mexico. A little bit more of the America of the clattering sewing machines — which are still standing behind him, operated by around 50 women who sew jackets and pants for the US military — disappears each year.

Coe says he plans to vote for trump because the candidate has “never been a politician.” Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been “bought by large corporations and is corrupt.” He says if Trump weren’t in the picture, he would probably vote for Bernie Sanders. Both candidates, he says, are running against “the system.”

He says he doesn’t know a lot about Britain, but he has the feeling that the British vote against the EU is somehow related to his own battle. “It’s good that Britain is leaving the EU,” he says. “Each country has its own identity.”

The phenomenon of the angry voter currently appears to be making significant strides toward conquering Western democracies at the moment. The outrage is directed against elites in politics and in the business community, against the established political parties, against the “mainstream media,” against free trade and, of course, against immigration. Many Brexiteers are among these angry voters, as are Trump supporters in the United States or Le Pen voters in France.

“Take back control” was one of the main slogans used by Brexit supporters in the United Kingdom. It could stand is as the cry for help from angry voters all around the world. In an era when increasingly complex free trade agreements or unknown EU commissioners are determining peoples’ own living conditions, voters once again yearn for borders, national legislative control and closed economies.

It’s a phenomenon that didn’t just pop up yesterday. But the rage has reached a boiling point this year, fueled by the financial and euro crises, by destabilization in the Middle East and the refugee flows it has spawned, by the rise of China and by the deindustrialization that has taken place in recent decades in many Western countries. In the Internet, this rage has found a forum where it can thrive. [Continue reading…]

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Van Rompuy: UK must accept free movement to stay in single market

The Guardian interviewed the former EU leader Herman Van Rompuy: Negotiations would be very difficult “because we have conflicting interests”, he said. He stressed that this was “nothing to do with punishment or revenge”, but the UK and the 27 other EU member states had different priorities. “The starting point for each of them is their own interests and the interests are at this stage … rather far away.”

Van Rompuy’s stance reflects the position agreed by 27 EU leaders last week, at a historic summit, where the UK had no place at the table. But other European politicians have raised hopes that compromise on free movement of people is in the offing. Alain Juppé, the frontrunner in France’s presidential elections, told the Financial Times that everything was up for negotiation.

Brussels-based insiders read Juppé’s remarks in a different way. “That doesn’t mean we compromise on basic principles,” said one senior national diplomat, adding that it would be “a mistake” for the UK to rely on talks with small groups of countries.

“It would make the position of the 27 more difficult to formulate and could lead to misunderstandings and illusions on the British side, and would prolong negative consequences,” he said.

Contrary to the claims of leave campaigners, Van Rompuy said Britain had more to lose than the EU from the breakup. “Europe is much more important to the British economy than the British economy is important to the 27,” he said.

Around 45% of British exports go to other EU countries, while the UK buys 16% of the EU27’s exported goods. [Continue reading…]

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In shadow of Brexit, NATO will sound message of unity against Russia

The New York Times reports: Polish leaders have been waiting for years for a NATO summit meeting that would recognize what, to them, is a self-evident reality: that the proper way to respond to an increasingly pugnacious Russia is to plant more alliance troops and weaponry along the eastern front.

But now that this is actually expected to happen during NATO’s two-day gathering here this week, the question is whether — with Britain’s startling exit from the European Union sucking up all the political oxygen — anyone will even notice.

“Militarily, this summit will be about strengthening forces along the eastern front,” said Michal Baranowski, director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund. “Politically, it’s a Brexit summit.”

The gathering here on Friday and Saturday — drawing every major leader in the trans-Atlantic alliance, including President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — will be the largest NATO summit meeting in history, with 28 delegations from European Union countries, 26 from other nations, and representatives from the United Nations and the World Bank.

Much of what is expected to be adopted has already been agreed upon in earlier meetings of foreign and defense ministers — “It is pre-cooked,” as Mr. Baranowski put it — so attention is likely to focus instead on how alliance members, including Britain, make an ostentatious show of Western unity despite the shadow of “Brexit” and the weakening of the European Union. [Continue reading…]

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Growing sense that strong women leaders are needed to ‘clean up the mess created by men’

The Guardian reports: There was a time when German political commentators loved to compare Angela Merkel to Margaret Thatcher. When the German chancellor first took office more than a decade ago, admirers and detractors alike wondered whether she would be her country’s Eiserne Frau or Iron Lady.

No one makes that comparison any more. With Theresa May the current frontrunner to become Britain’s next prime minister, commentators in Germany have been wondering, mostly approvingly, whether it is the British home secretary who could be “a duplicate of the German chancellor”. Like Merkel, the German TV commentator Wolfram Weimer noted on Tuesday, May “operates in an aloof and sober way, but … always knows what she wants”.

But she is also, of course, a woman, and in a piece for the German daily newspaper Die Welt, the writer Mara Delius expressed an increasingly widespread sense that May, along with Merkel and Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, represents part of a new “femokratie”, coming to “clean up the mess created by the men”. They were, she said, “postmodern Elektras in trouser suits and rubber gloves”. Thank goodness, the piece suggested, Europe looked at last to be in safe (female) hands.

Certainly these might seem to be remarkable times for female political leadership in Britain and across the world. May is joined at the front of the Conservative leadership race by Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister and former banker.

Should Labour MPs ever decide to move against Jeremy Corbyn, Angela Eagle has declared she will challenge him. Aside from Sturgeon, the Conservative and Labour party leaders in Scotland, the first minister of Northern Ireland and the leader of Plaid Cymru are all women. The Green party has been led by a woman for almost a decade and its former leader, Caroline Lucas, is running again as a job-share candidate.

Internationally, meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is the favourite to take the US presidency in November, and could even pick another woman, Elizabeth Warren, as her running mate. The head of the International Monetary Fund and the US attorney general are women, and the next UN secretary general, due to be chosen later this year, may well be too. [Continue reading…]

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After invoking Article 50, UK could still rescind notice to withdraw from EU, say French legal sources

The Guardian reports: [At a] hearing of the Treasury select committee, leading constitutional lawyers revealed that the French government legal service has informed the French government that the UK would be entitled to rescind a notice to withdraw even though it had invoked article 50.

Such flexibility would mean that even if it was triggered, the UK could reverse a decision to withdraw, if either parliament or a second referendum endorsed the step.

Michael Dougan, professor of European law at Liverpool University, also pointed out that any UK application to join Norway as a signatory to the European economic area (EEA) agreement – a means of maintaining access to the EU single market – could be vetoed by any single one of the remaining 27 EU member states, the four members of the European free trade area (Efta) and the European parliament, meaning 31 different institutions or states could block the UK signing the EEA.

The EEA is seen by some as the best stopping off point for the UK, since it retains UK access to the EU single market, but all EEA members are required to apply the principle of the free movement of people. [Continue reading…]

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Dutch Pegida leader and expelled German deputy hunt migrants on Bulgaria border

The Telegraph reports: The former frontwoman of Germany’s Pegida anti-Muslim movement and a leader of its Dutch offshoot have travelled to Bulgaria to hunt down migrants attempting to cross the border from Turkey, it has emerged.

Tatjana Festerling called on the “men of Europe” to travel to Bulgaria and join local vigilantes attempting to hunt down migrants.

Ms Festerling, who came to international notoriety earlier this year when she called for asylum-seekers to be shot if they attempted to cross the German border, was expelled from her post as Pegida’s deputy leader two weeks ago.

She boasted on her Facebook page on Friday of spending a day with the “Bulgarian Military Veterans Union”, a paramilitary group of vigilantes who patrol the border searching for illegal immigrants. Ms Festerling said she was accompanied on the trip by a leader of the Dutch offshoot of Pegida, Edwin Wagensveld.

She posted pictures of herself and Mr Wagensveld posing alongside men in military-style uniform, their faces masked with balaclavas, holding up a banner which read “Fortress Europe”. Requests for comment made to the Dutch branch of Pegida have not yet been returned. [Continue reading…]

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David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage described as ‘rats fleeing a sinking ship’ after Brexit vote

The Independent reports: David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been described as “rats fleeing a sinking ship” following their resignations in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s historic European Union referendum.

Guy Verhofstadt, the former Prime Minister of Belgium who now heads up the alliance of Liberal and Democrats for Europe, made the comparison the day after Mr Farage resigned as the leader of the UK Independence Party, saying “he couldn’t possibly achieve more”.

Mr Verhofstadt: “The Brexiters do not have a clue what needs to be done. Cameron, Johnson and Farage behave like rats fleeing a sinking ship.”

His unflattering depiction of the three senior British politicians came as Jean-Claude Junker, president of the European Commission, accused the former London mayor Mr Johnson and Mr Farage of quitting when things got difficult. “The Brexit heroes of yesterday are now the sad heroes of today,” Mr Juncker told a session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. [Continue reading…]

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Britain will still be in EU in 5 years’ time, says Austrian minister

Financial Times reports: Britain will still be a member of the EU in five years, Austria’s finance minister has predicted, arguing the economic volatility unleashed by the Brexit vote will prompt a rethink by the country.

Hans Jörg Schelling told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper that the reaction of financial markets and business since the June 23 referendum result had been a “salutary shock” for the UK.

The longer the uncertainty lasted, the greater would be the damage for the rest of Europe, the Austrian finance minister warned. But the impact would be “very much greater” in Britain.

In five years’ time, “there will still be 28 member countries [in the EU],” Mr Schelling said in an interview published late on Monday. “Great Britain will remain a member in the future.” [Continue reading…]

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UK government faces pre-emptive legal action over Brexit decision

The Guardian reports: A prominent law firm is taking pre-emptive legal action against the government, following the EU referendum result, to try to ensure article 50 is not triggered without an act of parliament.

Acting on behalf of an anonymous group of clients, solicitors at Mishcon de Reya have been in contact with government lawyers to seek assurances over the process, and plan to pursue it through the courts if they are not satisfied. The law firm has retained the services of senior constitutional barristers, including Lord Pannick QC and Rhodri Thompson QC.

Their initiative relies upon the ambiguous wording of article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which sets out how states could leave the EU. The first clause declares: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.”

One of the grounds of a likely challenge to the referendum is that it is merely advisory and the royal prerogative cannot be used to undermine parliamentary statute. [Continue reading…]

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If despairing Remainers try to sabotage Brexit, they risk a moral collapse

Paul Mason writes: Unfortunately, for the most enthusiastic among the remain insurgency, it is no longer a question of convincing the floating voter. Some are openly in favour of ignoring the vote, sabotaging it with a parliamentary procedure. Now, the first of the legal challenges, fronted by the law firm Mishcon de Reya, has been launched.

If this response gathers support – to ditch democracy because you cannot persuade the other side – you really will have the moral collapse of centrist politics. You can sense the danger amid the peevishness and personal backstabbing among the Tory backbench and the Labour centrists of yesteryear. It is displacement behaviour for what they should be doing; which is governing the country and shaping a coherent negotiating pitch with Brussels.

I voted remain, but through gritted teeth. I put my long-term criticisms of the EU second to my desire to prevent a Thatcherite power grab and the installation of an unelected government whose impulse will be to shrink the state, and to attack the very people who thought they were voting for liberation on 23 June.

For those of us who warned that “the EU is killing European values” the task is not to sabotage the vote. It is to nurture and defend those European values in a Britain whose future is now uncertain. The values of secularism, internationalism, science and a market constrained by social justice. Above all, we should revel in the democratic moment – even as it goes against us. [Continue reading…]

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UK free movement deal possible, hints French presidential favourite

The Guardian reports: Alain Juppé, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential elections, is to visit London and has suggested a deal may be possible on free movement of workers that will allow the UK access to the single market.

Juppé is quoted in the Financial Times as saying the issue is up for negotiation. The politician from the mainstream French right will visit London on Monday and is certain to be pressed to give a fuller explanation about how much flexibility of movement he envisages. His remarks do not tally with the position of either the European commission or the German or French governments.

Juppé is also expected to seek assurances about the status of French citizens living in the UK after the frontrunner for the Tory leadership, Theresa May, said the status of existing EU migrants would be a factor in any negotiations on the terms of a British withdrawal from the EU.

Her remarks were supported by the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, who said it would be absurd to give assurances on the status of EU citizens in the UK before similar assurances came from the EU about UK citizens. Hammond has been a leading UK voice arguing for a trade-off in talks between access to the single market and free movement of EU citizens.

The EU is uneasy about giving the UK any concessions on free movement since it is likely to lead to calls for similar treatment from other nationalist politicians in Europe.

The EU has been refusing any concessions for the Swiss on free movement despite a referendum in 2014 insisting the government impose immigration controls. Switzerland is wary of losing access to the European single market, and may have to hold a second referendum if no deal is offered by the EU. [Continue reading…]

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The 75%: Young voters in the UK want to remain in the EU

“We are the 48,” protesters on the March for Europe chanted in London yesterday.

I guess it’s possible this slogan was meant as a warning against the tyranny of the majority, but it seems more likely it was intended as a way of saying, “we are too many to be ignored.”

Either way, and given the preponderance of young people marching, “We are the 75%,” might have sent a stronger message.


Even so, no sooner had this emphatic support among young voters for remaining in the EU been noted a week ago, then another number started circulating widely — this one from Sky News who reported that among 18-24 year olds, the turnout had only been 36%.


Rather than viewing older voters as having betrayed the interests of their children and grandchildren, it looked like voter apathy among the young was as much to blame for the victory of the Leave camp.

But at the time, Barbara Speed at the New Statesman noted:

Sky isn’t claiming this is collected data – it’s projected, and a subsequent tweet said it was based on “9+/10 certainty to vote, usually/always votes, voted/ineligible at GE2015”. I’ve asked for more information on what this means, but for now it’s enough to say it’s nothing more than a guess.

Francesca Barber, who describes herself as British, European, and American, says “my generation failed to turn up… If we want our world to reflect our values and beliefs, we are going to have to engage and vote.”

But maybe before making strong judgments about generational failure, it’s worth having some renewed skepticism about the numbers in the Sky News tweet.

Michael Bruter, professor of political science and European politics at the LSE, and his colleague, Dr Sarah Harrison, have been analyzing responses from 2,113 British adults questioned between 24 and 30 June.

The Guardian reports:

Bruter and Harrison said they found turnout among young people to be far higher than data has so far suggested. “Young people cared and voted in very large numbers. We found turnout was very close to the national average, and much higher than in general and local elections.

“After correcting for over-reporting [people always say they vote more than they do], we found that the likely turnout of 18- to 24-year-olds was 70% – just 2.5% below the national average – and 67% for 25- to 29-year-olds.

This suggests that even if turnout among young voters had matched the national average, the outcome of the referendum would still have been the same.

For this reason, it’s perhaps worth restating: the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum was conclusive.

Nevertheless, there’s a strong argument to be made that a second referendum will still be necessary at the conclusion of Brexit negotiations, bearing in mind that no one even knows when or if that conclusion will be reached.

The EU has a serious credibility problem when it comes to its perceived lack of commitment to democratic processes. Many EU leaders are currently preoccupied with the fear that favorable terms for Brexit will have a domino effect across the Union. At the same time, some are calling for a “new vision for Europe.”

If the EU gets serious about this and goes beyond measures that are merely forms of damage control, then by the time the UK has finalized its withdrawal terms, the EU the UK will then be about to leave should be quite different from the one to which it now belongs.

This point will be reached in 2019 at the earliest or quite likely some years later. A referendum of British voters at that time would provide the basis for an informed decision.

This is not much different from having an opportunity and the time to read the small print before signing a contract. As things stand right now, British voters bought into a proposition whose terms are completely unknown.

Given that the Council of the European Union, through the Treaty of Nice, employs the use of a form of qualified majority voting which requires support representing 62% of the EU population, the UK could reasonably adopt the same principle in requiring that a second referendum seeking informed consent would need to cross the same threshold.

The EU and the UK have a common interest in showing that Brexit, as it unfolds, demonstrates a mutual commitment to the democratic process whatever the outcome.

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A climate of fear: Brexit vote triggers eruption of racism

The Guardian reports: In a room in St George’s Cathedral, Southwark, south London, on Thursday morning, more than 80 people, spilling into the corridor, talk about their experiences since the referendum result.

They are mainly from South America, holding Spanish passports, still members of the European Union, legitimately in the UK. Half a dozen had been expected. Barristers María González-Merello and John Samson hold a free weekly legal advice clinic for Spanish-speaking cleaners who work for government departments and major companies in the city. This was different.

“We called an emergency meeting because we’ve had so many people telling us about incidents [of apparent racism and xenophobia],” González-Merello says. “One woman had a cut in her pay packet, and when she complained she was told if she didn’t like it she should go back home. Another man was waiting for the night bus at 2am to go to work when a stranger said: ‘Haven’t you heard the news? You should have left.’”

At the meeting, packed with babies, toddlers and anxious adult faces, one woman says she has worked for an employer for six years. On the Friday of the referendum result she was offered a new, less attractive, zero-hours contract.

Another young woman says she and her friends, all with Spanish passports, regularly visit a Watford nightclub. Last weekend they were refused entry. “Is this because of Brexit?” they asked. The answer was yes.

González-Merello, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, says she was talking to her son on a bus in Spanish and a man said: “You fucking foreigners, you are always making a noise.”

Victims such as her, she says, are now self-policing, taking care, for instance, not to speak in a language other than English in public. Her 12-year-old son recently asked: “Mama, are you going to be deported?”

“It’s the hurt and humiliation,” she says. “And the concern that we don’t know where it may end.” [Continue reading…]

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Britain must have a general election before activating Article 50

Nick Clegg, former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats and former deputy prime minister, writes: Who would have thought? The Conservative party, the party of continuity and tradition, is now the cause of the greatest constitutional crisis in modern times. The party of business is now the source of reckless economic turmoil. The natural party of government is now presiding over paralysis in Westminster and Whitehall. The party of the British bulldog spirit is now leading our great country towards rudderless introspection.

There is something almost grotesque in the contrast between the self-indulgence of the Conservative leadership contest and the anxiety gripping millions of families worried about the future. The media swarms around Michael Gove’s self-absorbed pronouncements justifying the tawdry betrayal of his friends.

A nervous nation, unsure what it has done to itself, is subject to the tedious, vituperative comments from one Conservative nonentity about another. No wonder Theresa May – a diligent, hard-working if unimaginative politician – stands out as a grownup in that political playground.

This cannot go on. Somehow we must navigate the country through the months ahead. The government not only finds itself without leadership, it has no plan, no consensus and no clue about what it wants to do in the future. The only thing it agrees on is that the UK should leave the EU. But how, when and to what end all remain unanswered. It enjoys a mandate to quit, but no mandate as to how this should be done. [Continue reading…]

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