Facts matter in this referendum. Yet politics has always been about feelings and emotion as much as statistics and experience. Why else, for instance, would anti-immigrant sentiment often be highest in those areas with the lowest number of migrants and fly in the face of most, if not all, of the expert studies that have […]

Never before have so many had to decide on something they knew or cared so little about. The “London bubble” is obsessing about the EU referendum on June 23. The parts of Twitter I see are hyperventilating with excitement over designation, debates, purdah, net costs and benefits, and the like. But the majority of the […]

2015 will probably be seen as the year when the terms ‘EU’ and ‘crisis’ became inextricably linked. Yet 2016 may prove more challenging still. Chronic instability persists on Europe’s frontiers and both the turmoil in the eurozone and the chaos engendered by the arrival of waves of migrants and refugees look set to recur. Moreover, […]

In the Bloomberg speech of 2013 in which he promised a referendum on British EU membership by the end of 2017, David Cameron promised to carry out ‘renegotiations for fundamental change’ of Britain’s terms and conditions of their EU membership. In a speech at Chatham House today, he spelt out in more detail precisely what […]

Where to start when asked, in five points, to encapsulate an institution as complex, as contested, as frequently misunderstood and indeed as deliberately misrepresented as the European Union? Perhaps with the statement that both its supporters and detractors exaggerate their cases. 1. Rather than being the all-powerful behemoth frequently alluded to by its critics, the […]