Opinion

Your weekly check on how Project Fear is becoming Project Reality, selected by Steve Anglesey.  It has been a gloomy week on the sunlit uplands of sovereign Britain as Michael Gove’s war on experts appeared to have been extended to exports. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in charge of ensuring smooth trade after […]

Former education secretary DAVID BLUNKETT says the government has failed to appreciate the scale of the damage the pandemic is inflicting on children’s prospects. The British, or more accurately the English, handling of the Covid pandemic has thrown up two markedly different levels of success and competence. I’m not talking here about the fiascos relating […]

The French response to Brexit has not quite been a Gallic shrug. But it’s not been far off. PAULINE SCHNAPPER explains the view from Paris. The Brexit deal reached on Christmas Eve was a relief for France as much as for the rest of the EU, both because a deal (any deal!) was better than no-deal […]

We now live in the age of belief, says MITCH BENN, where conviction trumps everything. I’m under very few illusions as to how much influence I bring to bear on events. I can trot out wry observations and snarky comments (sometimes with a tune), so as to (hopefully) amuse the readers of this esteemed publication, […]

The unravelling of the deal over Northern Ireland exposes an unresolved issue at the heart of Brexit that is no closer to being resolved now than it was four years ago. STEVE RICHARDS reports.  What is the future for Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit? If the question were posed in an A-level examination the British […]

The unravelling of the deal over Northern Ireland exposes an unresolved issue at the heart of Brexit that is no closer to being resolved now than it was four years ago. STEVE RICHARDS reports.  What is the future for Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit? If the question were posed in an A-level examination the British […]

Remembering the group of Conservative MPs that their own leader dubbed the ‘Glamour Boys’ and threatened with deselection. In the 1920s and 1930s of buttoned-up Britain, homosexuality was an illicit act, and would remain that way until 1967 when the law changed in England and Wales. Even though gay culture was vibrant, it existed mostly underground, its […]

JAC LARNER and RICHARD WYN JONES on what lessons progressives can learn from the Welsh experience of devolution. The establishment in 1999 of what is now formally known as the Senedd was the culmination of a century and more of argument in favour of what used to be known – more pleasingly, we suggest – […]

JANE MORRICE is a former deputy speaker of the Northern Ireland assembly and helped to implement the Good Friday Agreement. In a very personal essay, she explains how she sees her British, Northern Irish and European identity, in the wake of Brexit. A ‘European unionist’ is everything the name suggests. In the broadest sense, it […]

RACHEL JOHNSON on her latest TV venture, the Covid restriction that most troubles her and a dawning realisation about Brexit. By the time you read this I will have made kedgeree for Mary Berry on national TV as well as a macaroni cheese for Michelin-starred Angela Hartnett, alongside former shadow chancellor, Ed Balls (Celebrity Best […]

The EU has blundered catastrophically over vaccines and behaved badly. Let’s be good neighbours about it, says LIZ GERARD. Well, what do you know! Here at last, to celebrate the double anniversary of Brexit and the UK’s first case of coronavirus, is an example of something the government has got right. Something we have done better […]

WILL SELF on Canada, and the relative his family shipped off there. “What’s the difference between Canada and yoghurt?” is a joke first told me in the 1970s – to which the answer was: “Yoghurt is a live culture.” A half-century on the same sort of snide attitude towards all things Canadian can be easily evinced from […]

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL on what parties of the left and centre can learn from Portugal. As I near the end of my second lockdown German course I am getting closer to the fluency I had around forty years ago before I started losing it (German, that is.) Is it too much if I do my German […]

We are not in a post-Trump era, just because the man himself has left the White House, says BONNIE GREER. When a family member announced that – finally – they were getting married, all of us were really happy. When we found out that they were marrying a Trump supporter, again, everyone was still really happy. This […]

For years ROB HUGHES wrote one of Europe’s best-read and most influential sports columns – the now-defunct International Herald Tribute’s Global Soccer. Today it is born again in the pages of The New European. This week we look at an unedifying clash between two of football’s most forceful players. Researchers at the University of Salzburg last […]

TIM WALKER remembers his old friend Ronald Harwood, a writer who left judgement to others. Ronald Harwood was fascinated by how individuals responded to stark moral dilemmas. He never, however, judged, and preferred to etch out his characters in shades of grey – rather than blacks and whites – and that’s what made his plays and […]

A route to rejoining the EU is possible, says reader Mark Sullivan. Judging from your readers’ letters, they are being too pessimistic on our rejoining the EU. Just because you can’t see the immediate pathway unfolding, doesn’t reduce the inevitability of market forces which resolutely point to this conclusion. How many commentators for example predicted […]

Readers analyse Brexit’s progress one month on and question whether it was worth it. As Mitch Benn humorously points out, in the face of incontrovertible evidence that Brexit is deeply damaging Britain, Remainers and Leavers must now be asking themselves what was the point of it all. Take the Brexit mantra ‘Taking back control’. It’s actually […]

Readers have their say on the EU vaccines crisis – and what it all means for the bloc. I think Paul Knott with his column was particularly prescient in his views about this ongoing debacle. As readers of this great paper are committed Remainers, it is really hard to reconcile the EU’s recent actions about […]

The SNP should not resist the prime minister’s visits to Scotland. Surely Nicola Sturgeon should have welcomed Boris Johnson’s visit to her patch? It’s difficult to think of anything more likely to further bolster support for independence and alienate more Scots. Maybe this is his first shot, and he’ll be back for a booster in […]

As Britain’s vaccine rollout gets further through the population, it’s challenges are going to mount, explains JAMES BALL. In this long, grey, lockdown winter there is only one real hope of a sustainable way to open up during the spring: the mass rollout of coronavirus vaccines. The comforting fact is there is a lot of […]

The prime minister of the Netherlands took responsibility for his government’s mistakes. Boris Johnson says he takes full responsibility for our 100,000 Covid deaths. Robert Jenrick says he’s proud of the many things the government has achieved in response to the pandemic. Really? Let’s just list a few of the arrant failures: to heed the […]

Last week was Holocaust Memorial Day, when we remember the millions murdered under Nazi persecution. This year marks 75 years since vital evidence of this was first presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trials alerting a largely unknowing world to the horrors that had occurred in concentration camps. Our great grandfather David Maxwell Fyfe was […]

The trading drama over GameStop has exposed a powerful new line of attack on financial institutions, say James Bowden and Edward Thomas Jones 

CATHRIN SCHAER on how the continent sees its vaccine troubles. While Brexit fans were busy trying to shout “I told you so” across the Channel as loudly as possible, following the recent AstraZeneca stoush, Europeans were – as they so often are – more worried about their own backyards than being in a race with Britain. There […]

IAN DUNT on his recent battle with Covid. I tested positive for Covid two weeks ago. The first sign that something was wrong was a hazy feeling of impending flu, which I brushed away. Two days later I was in bed with fever. It was ferocious: your skin either boiling or freezing, no position bearing […]

The EU has survived previous crises. But it is not guaranteed to get through the next one, says JOHN KAMPFNER. “All of us are responsible for the crisis, and all of us have a responsibility to resolve it.” “We cannot shoulder this alone in the long term. We need a European solution.” So said Donald […]

MATT KELLY on big changes coming to The New European. This week, The New European begins a new chapter in its own peculiar story. What began as a four week pop-up experiment, run by Archant, a local media company based in Norwich, to chronicle the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote soon became a small but […]

Readers hope lessons will be learned from Donald Trump’s time in the White House. I have just read A Promised Land, the first part of Barack Obama’s autobiography. Time and time again, his refusal to countenance actions which do not reflect his values – those he set out very clearly during his election campaign – […]

LIAM KENNEDY on Joe Biden’s inauguration message – and what it really means. The election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States was received across much of the world with a mixture of relief and exuberance, though often laced with apprehension. A common theme in news headlines and Twitter feeds was […]

The influence on English of the Old Norse language of the Vikings is still up for debate, says PETER TRUDGILL. When people are learning English as a foreign language, it is generally very useful for them to learn three main forms of every verb: the present tense, the past tense, and the past participle. Past participles occur […]

MITCH BENN on how Remainers are now accused of revelling in the adverse impacts of Brexit. There’s always an element of ‘preaching to the choir’ when it comes to print journalism in this country; pretty much every newspaper on the stands has, to varying degrees, a political standpoint of which its readers are aware and, presumably, endorse. So […]