One of the abiding questions of Brexit is how the very close referendum result in June 2016 led to a very hard Brexit in 2020, a Brexit that remains far from settled to this day. This is the main theme of Professor Chris Grey’s new book Brexit Unfolded. How No One Got What They Wanted […]
Ed: This is second of Ian’s analysis of the Tory decade of austerity. His first article appeared last Monday. The Conservative narrative in 2010 was that we had ‘maxed out on the credit card’. Public spending cuts seemed inevitable. Indeed the very fact that there have been big cuts while the deficit continued appears to […]
The pandemic has led to another big increase in public spending and growing pressures for more austerity. Understanding the last decade might help our thinking about the coming decade. An important question is why, after a decade of cuts, total public spending (pre-Covid) continued to be higher than revenue, ie there remained a deficit. The […]
By late August, despite all the difficulties in the summer, little seemed to have changed. The negotiations were stuck and it was widely acknowledged that top level political intervention would be necessary in the Autumn to kick-start the process. Well, the UK Internal Market Bill has certainly been a top level political intervention. Introduced in […]
Further to his analysis of the current state-of-play regarding EU-UK trade negotiations , Ian Bartle argues that any deal will be a hard Brexit – but still not as bad as a catastrophic no-deal As the UK and European Union resume negotiations over a trade deal, one thing is abundantly clear: even if there’s a […]
Much has happened in the past two months, though the overall picture remains the same: the deal/no-deal question hangs in the balance – the moment of truth will come sometime in the Autumn. Although any deal in prospect will be a hard and very damaging, it will be significantly better than a catastrophic no-deal (West […]