This week I went to a conference on ‘British politics after Brexit‘. We didn’t talk about Brexit very much, among the swirl of partygate, shifting opinion polls and questions over the viability of the Union. Which prompts a question about whether Brexit changed much and whether there’s still much impact of Brexit. I ask these […]

After much delay, the membership of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement’s (TCA) Parliamentary Partnership Assembly (PPA) was finally settled in late January. The Assembly is an advisory body to the TCA’s main Partnership Committee, “a forum to exchange view on the partnership” as the treaty has it (Art.11). Twice-yearly meetings will provide an additional line […]

As I seem to find myself regularly explaining, Brexit is a process, not an event. Which is all well and good, but also a bit problematic when you want to work out the appropriate context for that process. At one level, it is evidently simply part of a much longer process of developing British European […]

The arrival of 2022 has brought both continuity and change to the UK’s relationship with the EU. The resignation of Lord Frost in December has precipitated a major reorganisation (possibly still on-going) of the government’s management of EU and Brexit affairs, but the new point on the relationship – Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – has […]

As we’ve noted previously in this blog, Brexit is a process, not an event. With the drawing in of the year, we might usefully revisit this notion, since there’s more of the process heading our way. You’ll recall that one side-effect of the very speedy conclusion of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was that […]

A while back I wrote about the UK’s approach to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA), arguing that this was driven by a lack of strategic intent, resulting in constant efforts to keep things up in the air. In so doing, the UK aims to avoid falling into any settled pattern […]

As part of this blog’s ongoing monitoring of the two treaties, we regularly produce a tracker of meetings of the various bodies that they have set up. These trackers are useful at a number of levels. Firstly, the level of overall activity provides an indication of the vibrancy of the treaty and the extent to […]