There's nothing very surprising when the EU spends money in individual member States to enhance its standing, and to influence people in those States to work in what the EU sees as its interests. That's known as old-fashioned pork-barrelling. But when the EU argues that the bankrolling of political organisations within a State by those outside it i...
You may remember reading last week that a group of jihadists known as the Beatles had scored a Supreme Court victory over the Home Secretary. To remind you what it was all about, the Beatles were a charming group of ISIS zealots who had specialised in beheadings, torture and other yet more gruesome activities best not mentioned here, whom US forces...
But don't cheer too loudly yet! As you probably know, an important part of the mammoth EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, concerns the "right to be forgotten". This essentially means even if an article about someone is already in the public domain, search engines like Google or Yahoo, and news websites that provide search functionality...
In June 2016 a scandalised fellow academic asked me in a London restaurant why I was wearing a Leave badge. To my mention of the woeful lack of democracy in the EU he told me, as he would a backward student, that from my blinkered English position I clearly didn't understand the EU's fierce commitment to democracy. It was, simply a matter of being ...
As with a party conference, a lot of the interest in the Brexit circus lies in the supporting acts and side-shows. A recent instance of the latter arose from a spat between the Government and the Justice Subcommittee of the Lords' European Union select committee. This is worth a look, if only because a serious point of principle turns on it. When w...
The European Union is playing brinkmanship. It is making an offer of a 34-page composite "framework agreement", covering such matters as immigration, state aid, mutual recognition of industrial standards, agricultural products, air transport and land transport, where local rules would automatically adapt to be in line with EU law. The treaty would ...
There was, in the offices of the Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, frequent use of the phrase "Up to a point, Lord Copper". As alert readers will remember, it actually meant "No". The EU and its supporters have a good deal in common with the Beast, when it comes to taking ordinary words and saying they mean something new and unexpected. Think "c...
In the context of Brexit, things would be so much tidier if it wasn't for Northern Ireland. The province not only obstinately voted Remain, but also inconveniently promises to bring with it a new, uniquely porous, EU land border. If somehow one could leave Northern Ireland as a member of the EU and have the frontier redrawn in the Irish Sea, life w...
One remarkable feature about the EU is the degree to which national governments of the member states obey it almost without question. Ordered by the European Court of Justice to hand over large sums of their taxpayers' money to Brussels as a fine for some technical infringement of the EU treaties, they do so like lambs and virtually without questio...
The way in which the EU goes about producing the laws that bind the rest of us - whether our politicians like them or not - can be difficult to understand. If you're not intimately familiar with it, don't worry. You're in good company. If really interested, you'll find it in Arts.288-299 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, a tur...
