With the reshuffle barely over, noises are already being made about ditching the meddlesome Convention and Court. But how?
Dr Lee Rotherham is author of A Fate Worse Than Debt: A Beginner’s Guide to Britain’s National Debt from Boadicea to Cameron In the coming days we will see where the Spending Review is taking us. You never know: it might even draw a few precise statistics from Labour on what extra sums they’d commit […]
Dr Lee Rotherham is an author, historian and political campaigner, who has served as a TA reservist on three overseas deployments. He is on the Approved EU Candidates List. A recent poll offers some intriguing statistics on where the public may currently stand on the UK’s relationship with the EU. Open Europe, which commissioned the […]
Dr Lee Rotherham is an author, historian and political campaigner, who has served as a TA reservist on three overseas deployments. He is on the Approved EU Candidates List. Many years ago in my university days, I taught English at a French school. One day, one of my friends popped round dressed as a French […]
Dr Lee Rotherham is author of The EU in a Nutshell and A Fate Worst Than Debt. He is on the Conservatives’ Approved European Candidates List. Today is Europe Day, the time of year when we reflect on how wonderful European integration is. Well, sort of. Today is one Europe Day, the EU’s. The Council […]
Dr Lee Rotherham is author of A Fate Worse Than Debt: A History of Britain’s National Debt from Boadicea to Cameron, out now in bookshops. We live, so pundits say, in an Elizabethan Age. We can tell this because we have very few colonial possessions, tax tobacco, argue with the Pope over the New World, and […]
Dr Lee Rotherham is author of The EU in a Nutshell (Harriman House, 2012). This evening, if long-touted media diaries still hold, the CBIE is formally launching its campaign. There’s a lot in a name so we had better get this right. It’s obviously not the Canadian Bureau for International Education. It’s also not a branch of […]
By Dr Lee Rotherham. Downing Street press officers will no doubt be marketing Friday’s discourse as the “biggest speech since Bruges”. When David Cameron steps up to the podium, one trusts the media managers will have conscientiously swept the room of metaphor, covering up signs above doorways saying ‘Exit’. Will a stray EU flag be allowed […]
By Dr Lee Rotherham. Several years ago, I had the immense privilege of being selected as the Conservative general election candidate for Rotherham. The seat, of course, was held at the time by Denis MacShane, notorious for his EU logoed socks if not yet for already running a “think tank” next to his lawnmower. Dr […]
Dr Lee Rotherham is a research fellow at the TaxPayers' Alliance. Support for the European Union has long become a matter of political faith. Amongst Europe’s leaders, to dispute its role is practically a heresy; to challenge its powers, a trigger for anathema. Perhaps now may be the time for an injection of secularism into […]
When is a treaty change not a treaty change? When everyone in the negotiating room thinks they can get away with it. Today’s EU Council will come up with a deal to "fix" the Eurozone, at least over the short term. Everyone there will know that this needs to be done within the framework of […]
By Dr Lee Rotherham. In one corner stands a body of MPs who represent a large swathe of the country, very likely even a clear majority, who want an informed debate and referendum on an issue that has remained controversial across two generations. In the other corner rests a Prime Minister who rejects a referendum […]
It was, of course, inevitable that the Lib Dem leadership would swiftly grab at any flotsam from AV. House of Lords’ reform – and I use the term as loosely as talk of electoral "reform", since it is not automatically for the better – now looks like being part of the new agenda. Mr Clegg […]
By Lee Rotherham Christopher Hall’s article on Thursday set out a useful and detailed insight into the Liberal Party’s historic views of AV. In particular, it exposed how that party has for over a century seen it as a distraction from the real debate between the current system and PR – a tradition that is […]
EU regulations and directives do form a major block of domestic law and do generate a lot of business costs. We know this because Whitehall’s own past internal audits have revealed it, a field I have been tracking since John Major’s day.