How do you solve a problem like Europa?
Britain’s relationship with the European Union is much in the news at the moment, as what for want of a better word we might call our political leadership is dragged reluctantly towards a meaningful...
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As Thomas Pascoe reminds us that Cameron’s ‘budget triumph’ sees UK contributions to the EU go up, we ask ourselves what Uncle Jack would say: “This nation has ever been renowned for the bravest...
View ArticleIs Daniel Hannan right about UKIP?
“Why do they not tell us the reasons on which they have changed their faith, and assign some fair methods by which they have satisfied the doubts of conscience? Till they do this, we certainly have an...
View ArticleEndangered Specie: is the Euro really a ‘tragedy’?
Since Italy’s two leading comedians – at least one of them intentionally comic – managed such a good showing in the elections last week, Europe’s elite has evinced some concern in between meals. Not,...
View Article…what shall men say of thee, before whose feet the worlds divide?
If Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Claire Berlinski is right that neither praise nor criticism of the Iron Lady is possible until we learn not to think in terms of some mythological epic, then sadly we...
View ArticleFoxes, hedgehogs…and turkeys
This weekend, Douglas Murray uses the well-known idea about the fox and the hedgehog to illustrate developments in British politics: a charming conceit first used by Sir Isaiah Berlin in a 1951 essay...
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Special Ed Miliband argues that we should not have a vote on the European Union ‘because’ we should remain a member. We are not quite sure how these two things are related – surely, he is entitled to...
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European Arrest Warrant, forsooth. Always apply the John Wilkes Test to any procedural aspect of criminal justice: “To take any man into custody, and deprive him of his liberty, without having some...
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In a surprise move, instead of requesting accession to Gibraltar as one might expect, Spain apparently is taking measures to try to make Gibraltar accede to Spain. The mind boggles. Nihil sub sole...
View Article¡Que viván los piratas ingleses!
Fans of infantile machismo and hysterical self-righteousness should consider following the Hispanophone coverage of the Gibraltar and Falklands disputes, a particularly intriguing feature of which is...
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Our favourite kind of headline: “Judge rules for pragmatic trade-off between European and UK courts,” a fun consequence of which is that successful complainants will have to give an undertaking to...
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Writing today in the Daily Telegraph, the egregious Peter Oborne defends the virtue of loyalty to bad governments. Criticising Tory MPs’ public disagreement with their leader, he writes of their...
View ArticleOn the Great War, and other Anniversaries
We have come across a rather eccentric debate which is exercising the minds of the great and the good in the run up to the hundredth anniversary of the First World War later this year. It began when...
View ArticleResurrection
So it’s not just the Crimea: “Voting has begun in Venice and the surrounding region on whether to break away from Italy,” as the BBC has finally noticed. This is the culmination of a long-standing...
View ArticleThe Death of Money by James Rickards – a Review
In his 1976 essay Criticism, the musician and broadcaster Hans Keller wrote that, “in order to prove its phoniness beyond reasonable doubt, a profession has to create grave problems which it then fails...
View ArticleRobin Hood is back, and this time he has stochastic modelling
So the Financial Transaction Tax is back in the headlines, with the European Court of Justice dismissing the British government’s legal challenge on the frankly not unreasonable grounds that the FTT...
View ArticleEuropean Parliament Election Special!
Election fever is somehow failing to grip the peoples of the European Union as they gear up for their twice-a-decade opportunity to select representatives to serve them in Brussels or Strasbourg or...
View ArticleQuote of the Day
The news cycle is still apparently dominated today by the snoozetastic European ‘elections’. We hear from those who have actually found themselves in a polling station – presumably by accident – that...
View ArticleGeneral Election 2015 Special
“I doubt if history can show, in any country, at any time, a more greedy form of government than democracy as practised in Great Britain in the last fifty years… The common man has held the voting...
View ArticleAfter Ukip
Many people who do not share the modern consensus that government is now full of such bright and talented people that it thoroughly deserves its power to regulate us down to the underpants have tended...
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