Opinion

Readers of The New European react through our letters pages to this week’s cabinet reshuffle. Theresa May’s baffling treatment of Justine Greening is good for our cause. As a Remainer with a small majority in a massively pro-Remain area, she is now free to make the case for Remain from the backbenches and, more importantly, […]

Brexit is a career-killer for freelancers, argues reader Jayne Hamilton. I read your article on freelance musician Anneke Scott with sadness as I know exactly how she feels. If current negotiations are anything to go by, I will lose two-thirds of my livelihood at the very least because of Brexit. While companies export products, we […]

BONNIE GREER says we are not on board for the anti-immigration; nativist; and economic protectionism of the culture wars known as MAGA and Brexit. There can be no doubt that the presidency of Donald Trump will be a different one, 12 months or so from now. Trump himself will guarantee it through, among other things, […]

As the new year gets underway, JAMES BALL argues that pinning your hopes on BINO* (*Brexit In Name Only) is pointless. If you believe the new upbeat tone of lots of Brexit coverage, we enter 2018 with the chances of a cliff-edge Brexit much reduced: the EU and UK have agreed a deal for ‘phase […]

Anthea McDowell writes that she is feeling more hopeful about the next 12 months in politics compared to this time last year. As 2018 approaches I find myself considerably more hopeful than at this time last year, when the twin blows of Brexit and Trump made it hard for many of us to get out […]

Readers had plenty to say this week about Nigel Farage’s claim he’s ’53, separated and skint’. Nigel Farage says he is ’53, separated and skint’. It is probably the first time one of his sentences has been two-thirds accurate, but the last bit really bugs me. Because Farage is plainly not skint. He earns £90,000 […]

Reader Paul Hollands spent a week on a pro-Brexit Facebook group to break out of the Remain social media ‘bubble’. I have spent the last week in a pro-Brexit group on Facebook. I did this to try and break out of my ‘bubble’, but also I went in search of the reason why people voted […]

MITCH BENN asks whether the likes of David Davis and Donald Trump have decided that shame is a sign of weakness. First of all, some sort of apology is order; I have been laid low with bloke-flu since last we spoke. It seems to be one of those annoying colds which wipes you out completely […]

JAMES BALL asks whether we should expect more of a cabinet minister than an 11-year-old at primary school. Should we expect more of a cabinet minister, or an 11-year-old at primary school? This is maybe not a question we expect to ask ourselves, but when faced with the reality of David Davis’s tenure at the […]

The Prime Minister is doomed even if she survives yet another self-created crisis, writes reader Daniel Hunt. She is weak, lacking vision, and unable to unite her own party, let alone her coalition partners. The reluctance of the Tory plotters to knife her while Brexit remains in the balance is understandable. Less so is why […]

Parliament flexed its muscles tonight – and isn’t it glorious? Don’t listen to the ministers who will want to spin this differently, this is hugely significant. Theresa May now has to go to Brussels on the back of the first defeat she has suffered on her own business in the House of Commons. And what […]

MITCH BENN discusses how speaking in haste can often signal the truth I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying ‘there’s many a true word spoken in jest’. This is indeed the case (the whole satire industry depends upon it) but there are, if anything, even more true words spoken in haste. That is to say, […]

Berlin was once the hometown-that-never-was, but what do Germany and its capital represent now? Our driver was called Mehmet H. He performed what he described as a ‘Turkish tactic’ and got us through the Berlin traffic faster than we would have done otherwise. On the way to the Checkpoint Charlie area, he pointed out the […]

In his debut column JAMES BALL explores the dangers of a soft Brexit and the implications for Remainers Eighteen months on from the Brexit vote, you could be forgiven for believing the UK might be limping towards a finishing line over leaving the EU. Getting to this point has required a series of humiliating concessions […]

The New European editor on why today’s “breakthrough” will trigger a very public cabinet implosion The Brexit can has been kicked down the road. But not far. ‘In the absence of agreed solutions, the UK will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union,’ reads Article 49 of the […]

‘Irish Border unthinkable’ says Boris Johnson. ‘Isn’t this the same person that said the EU could go a whistle for more money and that £350m a week would go to the NHS…?’ asks reader Tony Howarth. ‘Irish Border unthinkable’ says Boris Johnson. Isn’t this the same person that said the EU could go a whistle […]

Has the constant reel of Brexit news got you pulling your hair out? Comedian and musician MITCH BENN looks at one piece of news this week that has taken minds off of Brexit. Hey folks. Do you sometimes find yourself longing for the days when I – and everyone else – had other things to […]

Remainers are still waiting for evidence of the cunning traps Labour were going to set for the government during this process, writes one reader. Two studies have shown that Labour’s surge at the last general election was mainly due to voters perceiving them as the party who would deliver the softest Brexit, or no Brexit […]

Why is MP and Brexiteer John Redwood advising readers to ‘Sell Britain’, despite claiming to have full confidence in the process? A few weeks ago, a small controversy raged online, one that deserves to be better known than it is. We can call it: ‘The Mystery of The Two John Redwoods’. At first there seemed […]

I didn’t get much from my Twitter spat with Kylie Minogue’s songwriter, but his famous lyrics certainly sum up the mindset of Brexiteers. I won’t lie to you; this hasn’t been an easy gig this week. I don’t necessarily regard it as being my responsibility to put a comical spin on events in every issue, […]

Here is a flavour of some of the recent letters we’ve received in The New European’s mailbag. Send your letters for publication to letters@theneweuropean.co.uk Boris Johnson blunders over Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, with potentially horrific consequences. Boris then appears before the House of Commons but declines to apologise. Michael Gove appears on TV to defend Boris but […]

The playwright, author and critic on the fight against change The American journalist and author, Thomas L. Friedman, has given the times we live in a name: the Age of Acceleration. Change has come and is coming so quickly that it compares to looking out of the window of a jet in flight. We cannot […]

The playwright, author and critic on Brexit’s false sense of English patriotism There is still a Leave demographic, slowly shrinking, but still resilient. Many ask why this is, even in the face of another possibly fatal intrusion of reality threatening that coup d’état against reason known as Brexit. As anyone really paying attention knows, the […]

America’s culture wars have raged for years, says BONNIE GREER. But Eminem’s intervention is a significant one US art and culture are at war with the US President. This is nothing new. The play MacBird! opened on Broadway not long after Lyndon Baines Johnson assumed the presidency. A huge hit, the play, based on Macbeth […]

The question, in a quiet voice, came from a woman in the audience at the Henley Festival’s Brexit debate, in a quiet voice: ‘So what do I tell my children now? They planned to live and work for a time in Europe. What now?’ The question was aimed at Douglas Carswell: ‘What now?’ Carswell, a […]

The real question of the Age is the question of authenticity. Jeremy Corbyn is authentic. Theresa May is not. During the US presidential election, for many, Donald Trump was authentic. For many, Hillary Clinton was not. Boris Johnson is seen as ‘Boris-is-Boris’. Authentic. Philip Hammond is ‘Spreadsheet Phil’, the Remainer, slowing down the Brexit juggernaut. […]

BONNIE GREER on the performers who can reinvent themselves for an overseas audience. In ITV’s latest hit period-soap Victoria, the French actor Bruno Wolkowitch plays the role of the wily and lecherous French king Louis Philippe. From about 1997-2006, Wolkowitch was French television’s version of Al Pacino, a brooding, intense, and sexy presence in a […]

The Age of Gaslighting is upon us. The dictionary definition is this: ‘Gaslighting is a form of manipulation whose purpose is to cause the victim to doubt their own perception, memory and sanity; to destabilise.’ The term comes from the 1938 play, Gas Light, by that master of English pre-war melodrama, Patrick Hamilton. The plot: […]

BONNIE GREER on the late Sir Peter Hall, a man who revolutionised English-speaking theatre Peter Hall called his memoir Making An Exhibition Of Myself, a phrase his mother would hurl at him from time to time. An only child, and the grandson of Queen Victoria’s ratcatcher, he was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, a […]

There is a way to understand how much the nation has changed since the EU referendum vote. In place of a kind of hard-headedness, that famed ‘British common sense’ that we immigrants find a hallmark of life on this island, there has emerged a kind of dream state. This Britain, woolly and dreamy, is like […]

Full disclosure: I’ve never drunk a glass of beer before in my life. Until this summer in Scotland. Before that, beer was the stuff in cans that my Dad and his cronies drank while watching the Chicago Cubs lose another baseball game. It was the drink guys guzzled while drifting in canoes down the Great […]

BONNIE GREER on the conviction that you can have your cake and eat it Like all questions that history deems to have ultimately been about a nation’s identity, its very soul, Brexit has quickly become a measure of more than itself. The pro-EU march on Westminster last weekend turned out Middle England, that bellwether of […]