Yvette Cooper MP, Shadow Home Secretary & Minister for Women & Equalities, responding to the Home Office/MoJ/ONS report on Sexual Offending in England and Wales said:
Diplomats the world over tend to be the EU's biggest fans: the system, after all, was designed by and for people like them. The US State Department has been consistently Euro-integrationist since the 1950s, pouring resources into various European pressure groups that shared its aim. Back in those early days, its concern was to build [...]
The best possible preparation for another year in the European Parliament is to spend a few days in Switzerland. The sunrise gilding the Alps gladdens the soul, and the cold mountain air – air that tastes as though it has never been breathed before – cheers you with every gulp. Here is a sovereign, peaceable, [...]
Peter Mandelson has written an unintentionally hilarious article in the Guardian in which he claims that mere talk of a different relationship with the EU will damage Britain's economy. 'International companies now headquartered in Britain will start wondering if they should opt for a continental base,' he writes. Sound familiar? Let me remind you of what [...]
It was my old boss Paul Goodman who started it. In an article for the Sunday Telegraph, he argued that the Tories had already lost the 2015 election. Four factors, he averred, combined to make a Cameron majority impossible: anti-Tory sentiment among the growing non-white population; the siphoning of Rightist votes to UKIP; the converse [...]
In opposition, David Cameron tried to stop his party gnawing at the European question. “Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about what we cared about,” he told his first Conservative conference as leader in 2006. “While parents were worried about getting the kids to school, we were banging [...]
First Jacques Delors called for Britain to be given a 'privileged partnership' with the EU: participation in the single market, but not the common political structures. Now the Union of European Federalists have called for 'associate membership', again envisaged as a kind of amplified trade deal. In both cases, the motive is uncomplicated: supporters of [...]
It’s difficult, nowadays, to recall the sheer awfulness of political and economic life at the beginning of 1973. Inflation was above 8 per cent, unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression. Trade union leaders were bigger household names than most Cabinet ministers. There were constant labour disputes: the New Year began with strikes [...]
My first impression of Malcolm Habour was, I confess, not a favourable one. It was at a Conservative Party Conference in the mid-1990s, and he was telling his Eurosceptic audience that they ought to come to the West Midlands and listen to the people whose livelihoods depended on the EU. Oh Lord, I thought to [...]
It is no surprise that King Albert II should oppose the break-up of Belgium: he stands to lose more than any of his subjects. All his predecessors – Belgium has arguably the most politically active monarchy in Europe – have taken the same line. In a state with no common language, culture or history, patriotism [...]