Many commentators and political actors have only recently begun to take seriously the possibility that the “transition period” for the UK’s exit from the European Union will end on 31st December 2020 without an agreement on the future EU/UK trading relationship. There was, however, always good reason to expect such a disruptive outcome, given the gap...Read More

At a lively conference on relations between the EU and Russia in London on 17th September a number of speakers took as their starting-point the fact that the new Commission was reviewing the state of these relations. It was uncertain what the outcome of this review would be. Two contrasting analyses were offered by the panel....Read More

A frequent criticism of the Prime Minister is that she prematurely triggered the Article 50 negotiations in March 2017 and did so without a realistic plan for their conduct. If she had waited longer and planned better, her critics contend, she could have negotiated a more acceptable Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration than the texts...Read More

Four conclusions emerge from the series of votes on Brexit in the House of Commons this week (29th January): • First, this government is so paralysed by internal division that it is incapable of pursuing any coherent policy in the negotiations. As long as it is in office but not in power, the UK is therefore...Read More

The issues relating to the status of Northern Ireland after Brexit, and in particular the Irish “backstop,” have not yet been resolved. The major political and administrative challenges confronting the Brexit negotiators in this area are however relatively clear. Assuming that the major economic changes ushered in by Brexit do not take effect until 2021,...Read More

The Conservative Cabinet has spent the past month in public controversy about the customs regime to be applied on the island of Ireland after Brexit. It is widely recognised that neither of the two favoured solutions canvassed within the Cabinet, a “customs partnership” and “maximum facilitation”, is acceptable to the European Union. Less widely understood...Read More

In his recent testimony to the House of Lords, Sir Ivan Rogers, former British Permanent Representative to the European Union, criticized as premature and ill-prepared the Prime Minister’s triggering last March of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. This is unfair to Theresa May. No different date for the beginning of the Brexit negotiations could...Read More

A book by Brendan Donnelly & Lord Hugh Dykes During the past twenty years the British discussion of European issues has increasingly lost contact with reality or rationality. Wilful ignorance, political opportunism and media manipulation have unrecognizably distorted the European debate in the United Kingdom. Even those in theory favourable to a central and constructive...Read More

For some politicians and commentators, Britain is always destined to be the ‘odd man out’ in the European Union, with a history and set of political attitudes which must always pit the United Kingdom’s interests against those of its neighbours. For others, such claims of British exceptionalism are at best much exaggerated, and to the...Read More