Opinion

What will 2021 bring us? Anniversaries, for a start. JONATHAN SALE flags up the notable events coming up to their centuries, bicentenaries, half-centuries and other round-figure dates which we can mark over the year. January begins with a crucial motoring anniversary, the centenary on the 15th of the day when automatic windscreen wipers reached the UK. […]

MARTYN SLOMAN reflects on a year in politics – and looks forward to life beyond the pandemic. Even if the imposition of Tier 4 in Norfolk had not made it impossible, I was not in the mood to celebrate on New Year’s Eve. 2020 was a disaster year.  Together with many readers of The New European […]

IAN DUNT offers a rallying cry for pro-Europeans. We’re out of the EU. No more Article 50. No more transition. For all intents and purposes, January 1, 2021, is the first true day of Brexit. It’s remarkable that after nearly half a decade it’s still possible to burn with shame and indignation at what is happening […]

This country will continue to suffer from Brexit but we should not despair, says DOMINIC GRIEVE. Geographical and economic realities will make greater co-operation with Europe inevitable. This week the United Kingdom embarks on a new chapter in its relations with its neighbours in the EU. Just as the statue of Janus looks two ways and […]

To say the trade agreement between the UK and the EU weighs in at 1,246 pages is to do it a disservice. The dossier of articles, declarations and annexes totalling some 467,000 words is no-one’s idea of light reading, but would still be less than half the length of Hilary Mantel’s acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy – an attainable task […]

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL on how the ‘bastard’ tendency which tormented John Major over the Maastricht Treaty has finally got its way. Have a guess where I was in early December 1991, and again in February 1992. Very well done at home, as mega-selling novelist Richard Osman says to viewers of BBC’s Pointless show, if a Dutch city the […]

TIM BALE assesses whether the deal with the EU means politicians on both sides of the debate will finally emerge from the trenches Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese army took some persuading before he would agree to hand over his sword, his rifle, and the dagger with which he intended to commit suicide […]

Left wing advocates of Brexit labour under a number of misapprehensions, says FRANCIS BECKETT – such as a mistaken belief it will make their aims more achievable and that all Remainers are middle class. Paul Embery is one of the brightest stars of Lexit – the faction that says that all proper socialists are Brexiters. […]

Guy Verhofstadt on his sadness as the transition period ends, and his optimism for the future. “There is one case,” wrote Dostoevsky, “and only one, when a man may deliberately and consciously desire something that is downright harmful even stupid, even extremely stupid, and that is: to have the right to desire what is even extremely […]

WILL SELF on receiving a New Year’s honour. Look, I realise that talk of a ‘happy new year’ must be anathema to readers of The New European this week: what with Britain ending its transition period with the European Union like some bizarre giant plague ship, under the captaincy of a erstwhile hack with a […]

It all started with ABBA, but Stockholm’s association with pure pop music has long outlasted the band, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Stockholm is the centre of the Swedish New Year’s Eve. Ever since 1895, the Skansen open-air museum – a collection of historical houses on Djurgården island – has hosted the national celebrations. The tradition of […]

At the very moment the Irish border reaches its centenary it is about to enter a new era, as Brexit finally comes into full effect. IAN WALKER presents a birthday biography. In May 2018, Jacob Rees-Mogg – then chairman of the hard Brexit Tory pressure group the ERG – declared: “I don’t think my visiting the Irish border is really […]

We don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone… Roger Casale on the end of free movement. Free movement of people is one of the EU’s most celebrated achievements. According to the December Eurobarometer survey, 81% of Europeans think free movement has benefitted the economy. Yet in Britain, it is often cited as one of the […]

HYWEL CERI JONES on the government’s decision to reject the EU’s Erasmus scheme as part of the Brexit deal. In finalising its treaty with the EU, to the dismay of many, PM Johnson has confirmed his last-minute negative decision to no longer participate in the EU`s Erasmus programme. This comes as a severe blow to […]

Ed Davey on why he is rejecting Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal – and why his Liberal Democrat colleagues will join him in doing so. In a week when the Prime Minister interrupted the holidays to finally announce the long overdue terms of the UK’s future relationship with the EU, you would think he would be […]

Nina de Ayala Parker reacts to the news that the UK will no longer participate in the EU Erasmus scheme after the end of the Brexit transition period. Thanks to Boris Johnson British students and young people will no longer be able to participate in the Erasmus exchange programme under the Brexit deal agreed today. […]

When Brexit inevitably goes wrong, who should take the greatest share of the blame? Readers have their say. Ian Dunt is right when he says “It is unsurprising that those who failed to stand up to Brexit are desperately trying to deflect blame when the damage rears into view”. However, I am not so sure […]

JIM CHISOLM on how the media has failed to challenge the narrative behind Brexit – and how the data shows the people wouldn’t vote for it again. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Four and a half years ago, enough people fell for […]

Will Self searches for meaning in the prime minister’s festive messages. Hanukkah ends on Friday December 18 this year – and I wonder whether our beloved leader will be delivering another filmed address to the British Jewish community. Last year’s message was both utterly bizarre and politically tendentious; and given that we’ve seen a year […]

Former Conservative special advisor BARNABY TOWNS imagines an alternative political universe where the 2016 was never held, or won by Remain.  As Great Britain – England, Scotland and Wales, but not Northern Ireland – stare down the abyss of casting aside nearly half a century of increasingly integrated trade and security relationships, it is worth […]

Keep your spirits high with The New European‘s alternative Christmas songs, specially penned for the season by columnist Mitch Benn BREXIT WONDERLAND Shop bells ring, no-one’s listening On the shelves, things are missing A worrying sight, we’re hungry tonight Starving in a Brexit Wonderland Gone away is the old deal Here to stay is the […]

Former Europe minister DENIS MACSHANE suggests the Brexit bluster is fading as the final deadline looms and predicts a feeble deal similar to the one offered to Theresa May The Brexit signals emerging from both London and Brussels are now pointing clearly to a deal largely on the terms that Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, […]

Twenty five years after a court ruling relating to an obscure Belgian midfielder transformed football here, is Brexit is about to reverse some of the changes? ROGER DOMENEGHETTI reports. In an era when footballers have the freedom to force moves between clubs and demand multi-million-pound salaries, it’s easy to forget that as recently as the early 1990s they were still effectively treated […]

BONNIE GREER on the weird dislocation that 2020 has brought, and how John Lennon has brought some perspective on it. The weird thing about lockdown and isolation is that stuff starts coming into your mind that you’ve never really grasped; never thought about. And new things, too: new worlds. For example, the highlight of my last […]

Alexandra Lloyd explains how a revered figure from Germany’s traumatic past has become a controversial part of the country’s debate about coronavirus measures. A video from an anti-lockdown protest in Germany has gone viral after a demonstrator compared herself to the anti-Nazi resister Sophie Scholl. Scholl was a 21-year-old student executed in 1943 for printing and […]

LIZ GERARD offers a lexicon for the last year, including many words you will never want to hear again. Activist lawyers Misguided solicitors and barristers who want the courts and the law, rather than Priti Patel, to determine whether migrants she doesn’t like should be deported. Anti-vaxxers Vocal ‘libertarians’ with a death wish for others. Often also […]

Things look particularly bleak this Christmas, but JAMES BALL finds some cause for optimism.  The midwinter is notoriously a bleak season – not for nothing is there a whole song along that theme. Similarly, it’s not coincidental that most cultures and religions mark some celebration of light or of joy in the middle of this […]

Once a fervent Eurosceptic, ED WEST explains why he has come to believe that leaving the EU will be a terrible blunder, in a thoughtful essay that will be a difficult read for Brexiteers and Remainers alike. Like a never-ending television series that should have been cancelled years ago, the Brexit saga reaches yet another season finale […]

Remainers are patriots who will be as pained as anyone by the damage that Brexit is about to cause their country, says IAN DUNT. The trap is right there waiting for us. Next month, Brexit goes from a theoretical issue to a practical reality. It will play out in declining GDP growth, investment, productivity and […]

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL on how the UK needed someone serious to take charge of Brexit – but ended up with Boris Johnson. When Boris Johnson first became prime minister, I called round a few contacts in European capitals, to get a feel for how they viewed what was by any calculation quite a major change from […]

Despite his establishment credentials the author John le Carré remained an outsider all his life, says CHARLIE CONNELLY, and was increasingly radicalised by Europe and Brexit.  There’s a broad perception that people become calmer politically as they grow older, the youthful firebrand activist gradually sensing the flames of radicalism dying down towards a dotage of faintly glowing […]

Today’s PMQs was  – definitely? maybe? – the last of 2020. That makes the session technically the Christmas special, and while, unlike most TV spectaculars, this gratifyingly wasn’t twice the usual length, at least it provided all the catchphrases you’ve come to know and love since Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer came to occupy the […]