1 November 2021
Regular users of this site will be aware that our home page has long provided a link to a ‘EURef2 Poll of Polls’ – and they may also have noticed that this facility has not been updated since the UK formally left the EU on 31 January last year. At that point, we decided to […]
22 June 2021
Five years ago this week, the UK voted by 52% to 48% to leave the European Union. After two general elections and an extended parliamentary stalemate, that decision was eventually implemented on January 31 2020, though it then took another eleven months before the UK left the EU single market and Customs Union. This is […]
4 February 2021
So opens (without the question mark) a hymn widely sung in Christian churches and chapels at Easter. But might it now also be an accurate summary of the state of the debate about Brexit? After all, the UK’s exit from the EU single market and the customs union at the beginning of last month marked […]
10 November 2020
Last year the headlines were dominated by Brexit. This year the issue has only sporadically made it onto the news agenda. This is despite the fact that an agreement has still not been reached between the UK and the EU about their future relationship – and the cliff edge that will come with the end […]
1 September 2020
The talks on Britain’s future relationship with the EU are reportedly coming to a crunch. Publically, at least, both the UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, and his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, are pessimistic about the prospects of a deal being reached in time for it to be put in place before the transition period terminates […]
27 April 2020
One of the questions with which historians can be expected to grapple in future is whether the implementation of Brexit at the end of January did or did not reflect the view of a majority of voters. If they conclude that it did, then despite its many twists and turns, the Brexit saga might come […]
31 January 2020
Today the UK leaves the EU, three and a half years after the original vote to do so in the 2016 EU referendum. The political difficulties in the way of implementing Brexit were finally cleared by the outcome of the general election in December, which gave the Conservatives – who were committed to the UK […]
23 June 2019
Today marks the third anniversary of the EU referendum in which the country voted narrowly (by 52% to 48%) in favour of leaving the EU. Since then, the country has spent much of the last three years debating how the process of leaving has and should be handled, the terms on which we should aim […]
27 February 2019
In what is by now becoming a familiar ritual, today MPs will once again vote on various proposals for how Brexit should be handled, while the government endeavours to secure itself more time to negotiate an amended deal with the EU. However, the backdrop against which today’s voting will take place is different from that […]
8 February 2019
Unsurprisingly, protagonists on all sides in the Brexit debate are keen to claim that their views reflect the will of a majority of voters. After all, the decision to leave the EU was made by the public in the first place, so being able to argue that what should happen now is backed by voters […]
