Three Lions: just maybe

Three Lions: just maybe

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HwBqf7f294 The perfect football song to capture the national mood I should start by apologising to Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish. This is a thread about England. It is also a thread about the continual disappointment and thwarted dreams that England’s national football team has visited on its fans so on that basis, perhaps fans from elsewhere will forgive me. On one level, England’s record in major football finals tournaments is quite impressive. Today’s match is the seventeenth time that…

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May’s Straw Man

May’s Straw Man

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The Chequers Brexit Plan is about winning the blame game Works away days invariably disappoint their participants and for all the beauty of the surroundings, the cabinet’s day out at Chequers won’t have been much different. Twelve hours of intensive discussions in literal hot-house conditions, to hammer out a Brexit policy that they could all stick to is surely no-one’s idea of fun. Even those politicians who have long dreamt of Britain leaving the European Union, the agreement of a…

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So a cabinet Brexit deal is done and there are no resignations

So a cabinet Brexit deal is done and there are no resignations

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The Cabinet has signed up to the May plan for Brexit. Question we don’t yet know the answer to – why did Brexiteers agree to a plan they dislike? Is it because they think it will be rejected by the EU? If so, May has won battle but war far from over. https://t.co/y5moqza7hs — Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson) July 6, 2018 Breaking: PM says Cabinet has agreed "a UK-EU free trade area which establishes a common rule book for industrial goods…

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Three times as many people are less confident now about Brexit compared with when Britain voted to leave

Three times as many people are less confident now about Brexit compared with when Britain voted to leave

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YouGov With the political world waiting for the outcome of the Chequers cabinet meeting YouGov has just issued the above polling showing people’s view of Brexit and asking them to compare with when the vote took place. A total of 61% say their view have not changed with 28% sticking with their original view that it would be good and 33% that it would be bad. Of course so much is up in the air and we will hopefully get…

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On this big day let’s remember Ken Clarke’s assessment of TMay just before she won the leadership

On this big day let’s remember Ken Clarke’s assessment of TMay just before she won the leadership

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The “bloody difficult woman” is tough for all sides to deal with One of the great nuggets that came out of the post Brexit referendum CON leadership contest was the above unguarded conversation between Ken Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind captured by Sky News when they thought the cameras were off them. Clarke’s descriptions of some of the leading figures who will be battling it out at Chequers today appear to be spot on particularly his observations on the woman who…

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If some of the threats we are hearing are carried out then the cabinet could look very different after the weekend

If some of the threats we are hearing are carried out then the cabinet could look very different after the weekend

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But who will be next out? I have a long history of getting bets on the next cabinet exit wrong and of losing a fair bit of money over the years. So I’m reluctant to enter this market at the moment giving all the talk we have been getting today ahead of tomorrow’s critical cabinet meeting at Chequers on the UK’s Brexit policy. It is one thing to try to suggest that you will go if the cabinet moves in…

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The sick rose. The disease in the English hard right and the failure of the rest of the right to confront it

The sick rose. The disease in the English hard right and the failure of the rest of the right to confront it

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Picture Credit: Wikimedia Commons On 16 June 2016, Thomas Mair fired a gun at Jo Cox MP, shouting “Britain first, this is for Britain. Britain will always come first. We are British independence. Make Britain independent.”  He then attacked her with a knife, shot at her again and again shouted “Britain first”. Sentencing him for murder, Mr Justice Wilkie, said to him: “You affect to be a patriot. The words you uttered repeatedly when you killed her give lip service…

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