Times / YouGov results on the Big Debate: Which side won ? Remain: 34% Leave: 39% Not sure:17% How will you vote? Remain 41% Leave 40% Not sure 8% Never mind the polls. How was it for you on the big stage? Was it about as relevant as the Eurovision Song Contest? More or less fun? Either way, didn’t they all do well! And that was the problem. It was a no score draw, both sides shooting and blocking like …
The arguments continue right down to the wire. The referendum has cut across the unionist/nationalist divide and – (nothing unusual here) – has split unionism. What is rarer is the DUP’s failure to press home their traditional case with the traditional fervour, suggesting they have doubts about it themselves, as Stephen McCaffery argues in The Detail. Sammy Wilson’s pitch for Leave has only one sentence directly about Northern Ireland and steers clear of concerns over a hard border. A leave vote will …
In just 250 words the Irish Times reports the scale of Brexit panic in Ireland, north and south. Promising “a huge campaign all over the world”, an informed source said a strong campaign is needed in the US, China and India and elsewhere to drive home the message that Ireland is separate from the UK and that it intends to stay in the EU. … Mr Cameron infuriated unionists yesterday when he warned travel restrictions may be needed between Northern …
As the polls lengthen in favour of Brexit, Vote Leave’s morale is on the up. The Brexit phenomenon is not reactionary, a delayed reaction to the loss of Empire or narrow English nationalism but it marks a revival of British self confidence. This I rate as a discovery to be taken with a pinch of salt. But so says Steve Hilton the one-off, wonderfully paradoxical engaging Tory radical who as Cameron’s guru used to pad about Downing St in tee …
On The View on the day the former PMs Major and Blair warned of the threat of Brexit to the Union and stability, Eamonn McCann erupted. It wasn’t “Blair, that man steeped in the blood of Iraq that brought peace”, he thundered (I quote him freely) “but the people of Northern Ireland who don’t want to fight each other. They are the peace process.” As a champion of the people en masse and in the abstract, Eamonn is surely right …
When we’re taking about Brexit fears, Newton Emerson in the Irish Times has an outlier scenario that’s sounds plausible but is full of holes. He imagines the possibility of an early UK election out of the post-referendum chaos regardless who wins, with the Conservatives in worse disarray than Labour. Jeremy Corbyn gets SNP support to form a government in exchange for a second referendum. Independence is won. NI unionism is demoralised. Corbyn reverts Labour to active support for a …
Northern Ireland is the only area where the Brexit referendum campaign barely figured in the recent devolved elections. The Constitution Unit of UCL where I’m an Hon Fellow hasn’t forgotten us and devolution generally. The Unit has just published a report based on a seminar that brought academics together from the three devolved areas to discuss how they’d be affected. It’s well worth reading as much for what they have in common as what makes each of them distinctive. The …
The BBC are announcing that today David Cameron is going to claim that the UK leaving the EU would increase risks to peace. The BBC suggested Elgar or Vaughan Williams should be playing. I suspect Holst’s Mars would be the most appropriate. Turning from the classic music back to the politics. One of the primary responsibilities: probably the prime responsibility of a Prime Minister or the like is maintaining the safety of the population that elected him and as such …
David McNarry’s latest foray into controversy has been to float – and then retract the suggestion that foreign workers (specifically a hypothetical Polish surgeon) be deported for minor crimes such as parking tickets. Although this may play well with a few it seems something of a gaffe: maybe UKIP’s leadership will not be too sorry to lose their sole NI MLA when McNarry stands down at the Assembly elections (to be fair retiring at 67 seems pretty reasonable). It also …
While all involved should be congratulated for staging it, goodness knows what the public made of the streamed Brexit debate. The horrible truth is that we are required to say yes or no to a question which admits of no clear answer. No one knows the cost of “uncertainty,” or the advantages of going it alone Dunkirk style. The Leave campaign is Panglossian, Remain is perilously like Mr Micawber. Call me parochial but the lack of a full time Northern …
