Monthly Archives: March 2019

Kajsa has started referring to my country as ‘your poor little island’. I can live with that. But I don’t imagine that patriotic Brexiteers will appreciate their proud nation’s being pitied in this way. But it’s all their fault. The … Continue reading →

I’ve never been there – there was a pilots’ strike when I planned to make a trip there once from Australia – but New Zealand has always lived in my imagination, as a kind of prelapsarian society where peace, justice … Continue reading →

This is good (from the New York Times). Be patient. It gets on to Brexit in the end. https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/INT_11167.html?nlid=66729954

There may be some good arguments for Brexit, but we’re hearing fewer and fewer of them as time goes by. As I’ve pointed out before (https://bernardjporter.com/2019/03/04/lazy-thinking/), most of the case on that side of the divide now centres on peripheral … Continue reading →

As nearly everyone predicted, May’s ‘deal’ was overwhelmingly rejected by the Commons again. Her deep-laid strategy seems to have been to scare her Conservative backbenchers into accepting it, for fear of something worse: a no-deal Brexit; or – God forbid … Continue reading →

Whatever his critics may say, Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to Brexit has been clear, principled and consistent from the start. He is a Eurosceptic, of course, as he is bound to be, as a socialist disturbed by the way the EU … Continue reading →

It’s good to see that the Labour Party has agreed to be investigated by an outside and (I hope) neutral body about claims made against it of ‘anti-semitism’: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/06/equality-watchdog-could-rule-on-whether-labour-broke-law. I’ve made my views up to now on this whole sorry … Continue reading →

My PhD research was done under the supervision of the late, dear RE (‘Robbie’) Robinson – DSO, DFC: he’d been a bomber pilot in the War – who first (I think) coined the term ‘free trade imperialism’ to describe Britain’s … Continue reading →

The BBC Today programme this morning reported an extraordinary shift in public opinion relating to immigration over the past three years. According to an apparently reputable recent survey, at the time of the Brexit vote only about a quarter of the … Continue reading →

I rarely travel by first class train, but I thought I’d allow myself the luxury for the last stage of my exhausting journey from Stockholm to Hull on Tuesday. (It was only £10 extra, and you get a free meal.) … Continue reading →