However, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s demand for a mere Commons vote on every treaty is a poor substitute for the real, much less fashionable solution.
If we are truly entering an “age of migration” then erecting such barriers around the welfare state is one of the more plausible ways of adapting to it.
His party walked out of Stormont because of the trade border which Theresa May and Boris Johnson introduced between Northern Ireland and the mainland during the Brexit negotiations. Despite some wild overselling of the Windsor Framework last year, that border has not gone away.
During the pandemic, the then-first minister struck a pious tone on the subject of open government. All the while, she and her advisers were deleting their messages.
In the event that Northern Ireland did become a weak link in the UK’s border security, it is not difficult to imagine a future government preferring to start quietly hiving off Northern Ireland.
Efforts to deepen the purse of patronage are, at least in part, understandable. But yesterday’s headlines perhaps illustrate the downside risk for prime ministers who indulge too freely in so doing.
The rebels have a fair case that the Government’s previous attempts to thread the needle on deportations have failed, and may fail again. But that doesn’t mean their amendments would get planes in the air.
Given that latent support for capital punishment is not a fringe position in Britain, one should expect that view to be more widespread in our political and media circles than it appears on the surface – and it is.
It means abandoning any claim that there might be a hung parliament in which the SNP could use their leverage to secure a second referendum.
If the Government wants to avoid the next Horizon scandal, whatever it is, they need to do more than merely strip the Post Office of its power to prosecute.
No wonder that the Prime Minister has tried this week to dampen speculation that he might call an election in the Spring.
There’s thus far little evidence that the upcoming leadership contest will feature any sort of reckoning with the party’s woeful performance in government at Cardiff Bay.
There is no easy way out of the toxic combination of already-high taxes, corrosive inflation, low productivity, and a Health Service funded exclusively by the taxpayer.
After the general election, the pretence that the next big battle for independence is just around the corner will finally have run out of road.
The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act expressly provides in Section 19 for an immunity system. Yet Sir Declan Morgan, the judge overseeing the process, says an adverse judgment will kill it.