Category: British Politics
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The Graveyard of Euroscepticism
“There could hardly be a more fitting place for the graveyard of Euroscepticism than Northern Ireland…”
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Book Launch
‘This is the most important book to come out of the struggles over Britain’s membership of the EU, and it makes all other works on the subject look trivial.’
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The Triumph of Global Britain
“The failures of Brexit so far must be laid on Tory Brexiters themselves: their inability to understand that economic growth was about much more than trade deals, and their resultant inability to deliver policies that were meaningfully different enough to demonstrate an authentic political independence of the status quo.”
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Keeping Control
“Instead of evaporating national sovereignty into the supranational forums of the EU, Starmer proposes to dissolve it away into local government.”
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Sovereignty and Industrial Relations
“By making the national arena of politics more meaningful, Brexit also makes industrial conflict and distributional struggles more meaningful, too.”
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Whatever Happened to the National Interest?
“Embedded in the idea of the national interest is the principle that there is a greater good that can be institutionalised through state structures and policy, and that political power can be meaningfully exercised to protect a people’s collective interests.”
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When Is a Coup not a Coup?
“The language of ‘soft coup’ tends to hide as much as it reveals about the character of the events it describes.”
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British Republicanism after Elizabeth
“The Queen was a symbol of the class compromise that lasted from the aftermath of the Second World War until the 1970s.”
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The Singaporeans’ Pyrrhic Victory
“Just as the gods of the market have spurned Truss and Kwarteng’s offerings, with dreary predictability, the left has sided with those very same gods…”
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Who Will Constitute the Nation?
“As the old forms and appearances of nationhood inherited from the past lose their grip on the popular imagination and loyalty, we can more clearly identify the nation’s essence. And it is a potentially inspiring one: it is our own self-government.”
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Who Should Control Foreign Policy?
“As with Covid policy, to ask the most basic questions about means, ends, costs, benefits with respect to Ukraine is verboten and will draw a barrage of smears”
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Johnson’s Populist Evasion
“The problem is not that Boris Johnson’s personal political inadequacy may have endangered the democratic gain that Brexit represents. The problem is that both in 2016 and again in 2019, Brexit had to be led by someone like Johnson.”