Following the EU-UK summit last month, I’ve finally got my ducks in a row on trying to track the substance of what follows. You’ll recall that apart from the Security & Defence Partnership, there was not a single definitive legal instrument. Instead, there was lots of language about ‘working towards’ things or ‘exploring possibilities’: all […]

One of the joys of listening to Radio 4 is that while having my regular daily walk yesterday I heard a lovely discussion about the 50th anniversary of Jaws, the film that created the summer blockbuster and gave us some top meme-worthy comment. It feels apposite to mention this because one of my main takeaways […]

Not so much a post as a list of links for you this time, as I’ve been working up from a thread on BlueSky to a graphic to a podcast. The central theme here is how the UK-EU relationship is affected by the chaotic Trump administration in the US, particularly in the wake of his […]

This week’s vote on the Consent motion was unremarkable enough that there was hardly any media coverage in the run-up, even in Northern Ireland itself. Positions had been long-known and the result (a simple majority) was a given, despite the (sometimes long-winded) efforts of some MLAs to convince others. For a mechanism that had raised […]

Maybe it’s some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, but since the Tories left office I have not felt the same urge to write about British European policy. Equally possibly, it might be because I feel a bit broken by another government with a lack of clear purpose in this domain. Labour, like their predecessors, seem to […]

This piece was originally posted as part of the UK Election Analysis project. Do visit for lots of other pieces on all aspects of the 2024 General Election. Given that the past decade of British politics has arguably been shaped by the question of Europe more than any other single issue, one might have expected […]

It’s a week until the General Election, so a good point to consider the European issue in the campaign so far. This will be a short post, mostly because very few parties want to talk about the EU, and those that do are using it for a very specific purpose. Quite the contrast to 2019. […]