A 27-year dispute has been put to rest in Europe after a name deal was sealed between Athens and Skopje. The Greek parliament has rejected Macedonia’s name for decades since its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Following the name deal in January, Greece’s neighbour will now add ‘North’ to its title, taking on the new […]
EU
Never Gonna Give EU Up
EVERY time that I think I’m over Brexit, I realise that I’m really, *really* not. It’s been over two years: I’m still deeply angry. I’m angry that politicians sold false promises for their own political gain (and that the British people fell for them), I’m angry that Brexit deal negotiations have devolved into utter shambles. […]
Brexit, Northern Ireland & the DUP
Perhaps the most exhausted quotation in modern poetry is W.B Yeats: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the land”. It begins Patrick Cockburn’s book Chaos & the Caliphate. It is woven throughout Thomas Pynchon’s epic Gravity’s Rainbow, and has served title for books on madness to collections of wildlife […]
Stuck on Mount Brexit
Theresa May likes her walking holidays. She reportedly decided to call last year’s general election on one such venture in Snowdonia. She may not have visited her other favourite (the Swiss Alps) this year because it seems as though she is there already- climbing a huge mountain, with little grip, and rather a big crevasse […]
Germany’s Migration Crisis: The Policy Which Nearly Ended the Coalition
In 2015, the European Union faced rising figures of people seeking refuge in Europe in an attempt to escape war, poverty and persecution. Images and accounts of families and children fleeing their homes in cramped and dangerous conditions across the Mediterranean put an increasing amount of pressure on governments and the EU to act fast […]
Boris Johnson’s Charm Offensive of Latin America
The Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has returned from his five-day Latin American tour of Peru, Argentina and Chile that was conducted from the 19th to 23rd May. The tour gave Prime Minister Theresa May some much needed breathing space to attempt to affirm her government’s position regarding what form the UK’s exit from the European […]
Some Vague Utopia – A Brexit Update
Just before Christmas, Theresa May returned from Brussels a hero. In the space of a week she had seemingly salvaged a process that appeared on the brink of collapse, as the Democratic Unionist Party – her government’s only lifeline in the House of Commons – had refused to endorse the preliminary deal on the Irish […]
How to ‘win’ elections and alienate people
The Prime Minister stands triumphant in the House of Commons, a majority larger than Margaret Thatcher’s stacked up behind her. The opposition benches are noticeably emptier. Over half of Labour MPs lost their seats in the Tory tsunami. The SNP collapsed as Scotland’s electoral map turned blue for the first time in decades. You can […]
The Brexit Election
Theresa May has a comical aversion to giving a straight answer. For a long time, her only public pronouncements on Brexit were slogans: ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and, when challenged on whether it would be a hard or soft Brexit, the particularly laughable ‘Red, White, and Blue Brexit’. In January, she gave the public its clearest […]
Brexit negotiations – where are they going with this?
Brexit means … what, exactly? The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. That much is clear, assuming the stars don’t align and send a bewildered Tim Farron to Downing Street in June’s general election. What isn’t clear, however, is what comes next: what the next two years of Brexit talks will look like, […]