A lot of people seem to believe that the UK can solve its Brexit problems by “just staying in the single market” or a similar form of words. To put it another way, the underlying theory here is that the European Economic Area agreement gives the European single market an existence independent of the European…
Read More Can you “just stay in the single market”?I’ve just been re-reading the end of Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes. Here’s something interesting. Skidelsky frames the debates in Whitehall about British proposals for the post-war economic settlement and about the negotiations with the USA as being between two key groups, whom he defines as the multilateralists and the Schachtians. Schachtian, of course, is…
Read More Who is the man….SCHACHT!Out funder Peter Hargreaves thinks leaving the European Union would be “like Dunkirk” and would turn us “into Singapore”. That he mentions two of the most catastrophic disasters in our history is surely Freudian. Dunkirk saw the British Army booted off the continent of Europe, forced to sabotage every bit of its equipment heavier than…
Read More #Brexit: strategic incompetence for fun and profitThis Peter Hitchens post is fascinating. First of all, there’s the massive degree of psychological projection on show. He spends hundreds of words berating literally the whole of the nation for lacking the courage to leap out of the European Union in favour of….whatever it is the Outs are in favour of. And then he…
Read More The Hitchens has spoken, and he said “You go first”Over at the Pol, I’ve been trying to answer the question: how long until robots take Brussels lobbyists’ expense accounts? Software. It’s eating the world, they say. You may already have guessed that this is a reprise of Project Lobster, and you’d be right. The inputs are the European Transparency Register, which lists lobbyists and…
Read More Eurolobster: a technical appendixSo, the urban development that kicked off all the protests in Turkey. “This is the only place to hang out here,” says Yavuz Selim, 17. “And everything is very expensive. As students we cannot afford it.” His friends agree. “We are quite bored here. There is nothing to do for us.”… While the municipality has…
Read More Here’s something about Turkey, and everyone elseRunciman x Moore x Thatcher. Ed Miliband is hoping that it’s 1977 all over again and he can be the one who surfs to power on a sea-change he has initiated in the battle of ideas. He is also, presumably, drawing comfort from the fact that before 1979 no one saw her as prime ministerial…
Read More interview with a pleasant dinosaurSo I was talking about ostalgie kitsch and people sleeping in Wartburgs in north London. What, they cry, is he on about? Well, let me throw this one out. When the word was invented, the people who felt ostalgic were a pretty well-defined group sociologically – they were the people who had been part of…
Read More feeling westalgic yet?OK, here’s a photo from my summer. The car, in front of the modernist building, in the rather dilapidated car park, is an actual product of the DDR, a Wartburg, with Hungarian plates. Where are we, and why? Obviously, we’re in Archway, N19, north London but not the cupcakey sort. The car park is next…
Read More What I did on my holidays: a stability pact photoQuietly, the Eurofighter project seems to be running into trouble. First of all, Dassault got the Indian contract and the Indians claim that Rafale is dramatically cheaper. Further, they weren’t impressed by the amount of stuff that is planned to come in future upgrades, whose delivery is still not certain. These upgrades are becoming a…
Read More slow-motion procurement failure