News and Opinion

It’s becoming clear what the British people want from Brexit. But they are not being given the option, says former PM Tony Blair This was on any basis an extraordinary election, unique in recent British political experience and with major political consequence. The country is deeply divided: between young and old; metropolitan and outside the […]

Forget the social media whirlwinds around media bias, impartiality is overrated As Britain continues to career head-long towards the cliff-edge that is Brexit, we can no longer afford the luxury of so-called broadcasting ‘impartiality.’ We’ve just had a mini social media whirlwind, puffed up by the announcement that the Head of the BBC in Westminster […]

A new Big Lie is currently entering the Big Lie lexicon. It is that 51.9% having voted Leave last June 23 – National Self-Harm Day – the number has now risen to over 80%. When the Brexit pathology is studied, hopefully by historians examining how the UK found its reverse gear and pulled back from […]

Cock ups, chaos and calamity – Brexit is a shitstorm like no other. We pick over the carcass of another rotting week of Brexit madness 10) Theresa May ‘Only the Conservatives can deliver a successful Brexit’ – remember that? It seems Theresa May is flip flopping on yet another election promise. She has now made […]

The New European is a unique newspaper; launched in the heat of the Brexit vote – and designed to last only four weeks – we are still here, more than a year later, and thanks to our growing community of readers, we are thriving. If this is your first time, then welcome. If you are […]

The Government’s actions based on the 2016 referendum’s outcome were politically illegitimate It is plain to every impartial observer that Brexit is a disaster, and promises yet worse. The harm to the UK, already happening and already mounting in ever larger quantities, is as clear as day. In any rational order a stop would have […]

Prime Minister Theresa May has become a much diminished figure on the world stage Whether you care for Theresa May or not, the sight right now of the PM of Great Britain on the world stage should give none of us pleasure. She has become a diminished figure. Next to the Queen she represents the […]

A vanity not evident in his years on the fringe has become visible. A retired MP whose left wing credentials are as good as those of his old friend, Jeremy Corbyn, sums up the Labour leader this way. ‘He’s a thoroughly decent human being who has led his life according to his principles. To say […]

Brexit minister Steve Baker appears to have a similar distain for experts as Michael Gove. He has dismissed concerns made by Royal College of Radiologists over the impact quitting Euratom will have on cancer treatment as ‘not correct’. RCR has issued a fresh warning that anything hitting the supply and transport of radioactive isotopes widely […]

It has been a very tough few months for the UK with terrorist atrocities and the horror of the Grenfell Tower. So it is perhaps not surprising that Theresa May has admitted to shedding a tear … although it was the loss of her majority that got the PM blubbing. May said she shed a […]

There are encouraging signs for bears across Europe. But for one subspecies – numbering only around 50 – the situation is particularly perilous. Efforts are being made to find out more about this isolated population right in the heart of Italy. Eurasian Brown Bear (Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0) – Credit: Archant It’s hard to […]

Where can I buy The New European? What stories are in the latest issue of The New European? https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/885430400377606144 The New European is a unique newspaper; launched in the heat of the Brexit vote – and designed to last only four weeks – we are still here, more than a year later, and thanks to […]

The shadows of impeachment hanging over the White House have darkened massively… thanks to the New York Times which might yet end up emulating the Washington Post in bringing down a disgraced president. The string of damning emails Donald Trump Jr was forced to release in the wake of the newspaper’s investigation clearly show the […]

Both will be as bad as the other. Julia Hartley-Brewer is a nice person. There, I said it. No, really; I’ve worked with her a few times over the years on various radio things (although last time we actually conversed on Twitter she insisted she had no idea who I was, which is entirely possible) […]

Uncertainty over the final outcome of Brexit negotiations has left Britain’s healthy credit rating ‘under pressure’. Moody’s, one of the worlds leading rating agencies, said it remained unclear whether the Government would be able to deliver a ‘reasonably good outcome’ from Brexit, and warned that growth prospects over the medium term will be ‘materially weaker’ […]

Don’t bet against it. Predictions, predictions….sometimes you can get them right and passionately wish you hadn’t. Take June last year when, as a staunchly pro-Remain columnist, I forecast that Leave would win the EU referendum despite the polls telling a different story. That was a forecast based on my own research among contacts in Labour […]

Deep in the Arctic is a vault built to help save the world from disaster. But it may not be as secure as we had hoped There is a fearful irony to recent news of flooding at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. This was supposed to be humanity’s most impregnable bulwark against famine, […]

In Romanian Moldavia,the Csángós are oppressed by their Romanian neighbours and misunderstood by their Hungarian ‘relatives’. Photo: Contributed – Credit: Archant Hungarian is a language which is generally considered to have no close linguistic relatives, in any sense of the word ‘close’. Its nearest linguistic relations seem to be the Mansi and Khanty languages, which […]

Matt Kelly recalls an eventful year for The New European Ten of the best New European front pagesCreate line charts .

Our culture correspondent on the filmmaker Francois Ozon, whose latest works veer from comparatively chaste to France’s answer to Fifty Shades of Grey. The French film-maker Francois Ozon was already having a stellar year. Frantz, his film about Franco-German relations in the aftermath of the First World War, has had rave reviews around the world. […]

An ice cold San Miguel on a Spanish beach, or a glass of a Bordeaux in a Paris restaurant might seem like the ultimate in European drinks, but these ten classics are underrated examples of the continent’s cocktails, cordials and concentrates. Ireland’s most famous export, or ‘The Black Stuff’. – Credit: Archant 1. Guinness From […]

The government’s offer to EU citizens living here swaps freedom of movement for a different set of rights, protected under UK law. Far from being generous the offer is way off the mark For some years in my work I have argued that freedom of movement does not necessarily lead to settlement. There are many […]

From strong and stable to weak and feeble – a year of failure and fiasco in May’s Number 10 For long spells it looked as though she was a long-term fixture as Britain’s Prime Minister but now, after just 12 months, she is teetering on the political abyss. From her largely unchallenged anointment to the […]

Shortly after the outbreak of WW2, a polemic was published identifying the ‘guilty men’ who had led Britain to such a moment of weakness and peril. Now, following Brexit, a new version has been released. It’s a curious case of the dog that didn’t bark. Not only was it silent during the entire Brexit referendum […]

The A of austerity, plus the B of Brexit may be heading to the C of a crashing economy, but there is still time to change things. After the past weeks of horror, terror, turmoil, and hubris that has brought chaos – only the Greeks had adequate words for both – anyone who offers forecasts […]

The European Parliament’s top Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt has rubbished Theresa May’s offer on citizens’ rights. Verhofstadt said the offer was a ‘damp squib’ which would create ”second-class citizenship’. In a joint article with a cross-party group of senior MEPs, Verhofstadt said the Prime Minister was casting a ‘dark cloud’ over people’s status. The MEPs […]

A Brexiteer MP who used a racist term to describe quitting Europe with no deal has been suspended. https://twitter.com/mk1969/status/884474334370254849 While talking to a meeting about the financial sector post-Brexit, Anne Marie Morris said: ‘… then we get to the real n***** in the woodpile which is in two years what happens if there is no […]

As Spanish women score a significant success against excessive space-taking by men, we find out why manspreading was an issue they felt needed addressing. Photo: nevermindtheend – Credit: Archant ‘Manspreading’ is the neologism coined to label the practice of men sitting, usually on public transport, with their legs spread wide apart. Its etymology goes back […]

The marmalade-eating bear is a symbol of refugees and shows how we should treat them. A children’s story about a bumbling bear with a heart of gold is perhaps not the first place you would expect to glean insights into the trauma of the Second World War or the plight of the refugee. But Michael […]

Everyone is buying Europe just when Britain is selling La construction européenne est ‘fragilisée par la prolifération bureaucratique’ et ‘le scepticisme croissant qui en découle’. The European construction is ‘weakened by bureaucratic proliferation’ and ‘the growing scepticism that ensues’, Emmanuel Macron announced at his gathering of legislators at Versailles. Summoning what could only be described […]

Could Brexit encourage us to be a bit more European when it comes to the fish we eat? https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/884359244568555521 It was little over a year ago that Nigel Farage led his Alan Partridge-esque fishing flotilla up the Thames, horns a-hooting. It was a savvy marketing stunt: most fishermen are less than buoyed by EU quotas. […]

Get ready for price hikes, diminished quality and less choice in the shops post-Brexit. That is the stark warning former boss of supermarket giant Sainsbury’s believes will become a new reality for British shoppers once the country quits the European Union. Justin King said consumers are ‘completely in the dark’ over the effect leaving the […]