Articles by Alexandra Phillips
Theresa May’s Brexit Speech in Midst of Rising Euroscepticism
The EU is hardly showering itself in glory among its citizens, tired of a lack of accountability and a deeply controversial migration policy. Brussels would be minded to not serve a blow to European businesses, too, just to frustrate Brexit … Continue reading
Trump’s ‘Retweets’ and ‘Tweets’ Cause Diplomatic Uproar in UK
During the press conference, the Jordanians cheered as May firmly refused to condone Trump’s Tweet. Meanwhile, back in Westminster, MPs on both sides of the house lined up to say, ‘enough is enough’. Senior British diplomat and Ambassador to America, … Continue reading
Winning the Moral Argument for Brexit: Emancipating the British Economy from Fortress Europe
As long as a product states ‘Fair Trade’ on the label and promises to build new schools, nobody pauses to wonder why coffee beans grown in Africa are not being roasted and sold by Africa. In 2014 Africa made £1.6 … Continue reading
Theresa May’s Florence Speech: A Deeply Brexity-looking Brexit
Britain won’t be seeking an unfair competitive advantage. It will be seeking a perfectly fair competitive advantage, which is exactly what the British people voted for. I have advocated for a long time that we do not need to be … Continue reading
BREXIT and Free Trade: Let’s Talk About ‘Conscious Uncoupling’
The public, while united over ending free movement of people and regaining full legislative autonomy from the European Courts of Justice, are not particularly perturbed by the idea of limited ongoing payments for a degree of access to the EU … Continue reading
The False Dichotomy Between Hard and Soft Brexit
Without doubt, Brexit is going to be a long, drawn out and complex process. It is the surgical separation of conjoined twins, not the amputation of necrotising flesh. If the main impetus for leaving was a rejection of bureaucratic, unaccountable … Continue reading
The European Spring Was Sprung, But Only a Fool Would Imagine Euroscepticism Is Dead in the UK
As I have made plain before, there is no such thing as a soft and a hard Brexit. This is little more than a narrative device enabling politicians to adopt a multitude of contradictory opinions in order to appease all … Continue reading
UK General Election Analysis
While the left hungrily defends anything considered minority, they feel emboldened to attack what have hitherto been majority viewpoints in an increasingly fascistic manner. I don’t know what this new social religion is, nor do I really wish to sign … Continue reading
Trump and America’s Changing Relationship with Europe
Two men changing the face of the Western political establishment joined together on stage. A tight handshake that would come to mark the future President of America’s most analysed body language… Continue reading
An Election to Change the Course of History
Perhaps Sturgeon’s bloody mindedness and political myopia will be her own downfall. To her, the primary narrative for a second ballot has been that Brexit is entirely against Scotland’s democratic wishes, as Scotland voted by a significant margin to remain. … Continue reading
Powell: Portentious or Polarising
Enoch Powell, of course, was an esteemed scholar. He was the most brilliant classical scholar of his generation at Cambridge, becoming the youngest professor in the British Empire, the youngest Brigadier in the Army, and the youngest Cabinet Minister. This … Continue reading
The EU’s Existential Crisis
Will the EU ship sink? With Britain leading the way and being the first member state to jump overboard, the question now hangs in the air of what will happen to the Union. There is no need for it to … Continue reading
The Peaceful Revolution is Complete
Perhaps the most assertive and British thing about Brexit was not the audacity to turn to a continent and say sorry and farewell, but the manner in which it was done. And that, I would argue, should give 65 million … Continue reading
Major’s Major Mistakes
The man responsible for putting pen to paper over the infamous Maastricht Treaty in 1992 tried to tell the country that they were the ones who had been wrong to back Brexit. John Major, part of the crack team of … Continue reading
Lords Rebellion Won’t Scupper Brexit – Here’s Why
By Alexandra Phillips l March 8, 2017 LONDON-There was a sharp intake of breath yesterday as the House of Lords added a second amendment to the Government’s Brexit Bill. The legislation enabling Theresa May to trigger Article 50 by the … Continue reading
Perhaps We Should Be Thankful for the Frenzy on the Radical Left
A braying and hypersensitive radical left is in many respects far better than their wily New Labour predecessors. After all, it was the likes of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson who secretly administered the snake oil that sold Britain across … Continue reading
Brexit and Trump, the Two Big Electoral Shocks of 2016, Meet the New Narrative
When Theresa May went to meet Donald Trump in Washington, I was avidly watching and waiting to see how they would meld. The result was what I wanted: A reaffirmation of one of the most important global alliances in history, … Continue reading
Why Theresa May Has Played a Blinder
What with all the new free trade deals in the pipeline for Britain, and the EU’s infamous glacial pace at negotiating anything, as well as the constant economic alarm bells clanging from the crippled economies of the Mediterranean Eurozone (that … Continue reading
2017 Will Hail the European Spring
Scan the entire continent and there are more than just small pockets of discontent. Brexit is likely the first domino to fall and Malta’s Muscat must surely know this. It is under his stewardship what happens next. For the EU, … Continue reading
Brexit Means Business
My advice to Theresa May is “come to Ghana”. Come to the smaller countries in the developing world, trying to break through into the global market place. Come to the African Commonwealth who have been heinously undermined by multinational trade deals piped through the one-stop-shop of plutocratic Brussels where big business have dictated terms which have seen West African nations stripped of tariffs that afforded one third of their national GDP, being forced to trade on even terms when the ground is far from that. This week Theresa May said Brexit offered the UK the opportunity to be a world leader. Come to Ghana, Mrs May, or as Ghanaians would say ‘Akwaaba’. I am sure you will be very welcome indeed. Continue reading
Brexit, Article 50 and constitutional crisis: Why our quaint little nation, with its incredible history, was never really part of the EU
By repealing the European Economic Communities Act 1972 that initially brought us into the EU, decades of improvised legislative stacking would suddenly become unconstitutional. If a direct ‘yes or no’ question were put to Parliament, on repealing the Act or … Continue reading
Brexit: UK High Court Intervenes
Nobody is saying the referendum shouldn’t have happened, nor does this current judgment deny the result, it merely questions the apparatus by which the decision is now put into effect. The process should have the continuous involvement of recourse to Parliament, and could therefore drag on even longer, opening the door for economic instability both in the UK and in Europe in the interim. With a second Eurozone crisis looming, nobody wants Brexit to take decades. Continue reading
How does a Union leave a Union?
The principle clamor from each devolved country’s Nationalists is to remain in the Single Market, essentially a false dichotomy and surely off the table, thus moving the narrative closer towards a second Scottish referendum. May doesn’t appear willing to give way, and Sturgeon’s majority is such that she has almost absolute power in Scotland. I wonder now whether the imperative ‘leave’, from Catalonia to Cardiff to California is an even more attractive concept, in a new digitized, global era Continue reading
When does Brexit mean Brexit?
It’s fair to say that the new UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, having only been in office for a mere couple of months, has already demonstrated that she intends her government to commit to ‘full Brexit’. She has prudently placed … Continue reading
