The wake up uk blog

It was a while back that I stopped closely following Middle East affairs. I know what I know and have a settled view – but reporting the elaborate twists and turns of the increasingly convoluted affairs of the region is a job for a specialist and takes more time than...

I am quite taken by the kindly and often well-intention advice to the effect that I should tone down my rhetoric on UKIP and, more particularly, that I should not write about UKIP at all. These are the people who would have me concentrate on the "real" issues and...

There is some excellent stuff from Robin Harris in today's Mail - at least to start with, when he puts the "reformists" in their places. "So often, discussion about the benefits and costs of British membership of the EU seems to come down to economics, " Harris says....

It is actually one of our forum members who notes that the EU aid paid to Egypt would be a valid issue for UKIP to take up.This is especially the case as, in addition to the €1 billion paid between 2007-13, it seems the EU also paid €686 million between 1996 and 1999,...

Instead, they seem to have taken no action at all - not even the overpaid Baroness Ashton. Our money continued to be poured into the coffers of the Egyptian Authorities. The lack of budgetary transparency continued. An ineffective audit function continued,. Endemic...

That's the blunt message conveyed by Spiegel as it marks the start of Merkel's general election campaign, with the poll set for 22 September, a mere six week's time.As it stands, the money is on Merkel's CDU-led "yellow-black" coalition winning, although even Merkel...

First you take an industrial sector and weaken the national system of control. Then you impose a clumsy and inadequate system of regulation and watch it fail. Then, to "improve" the system, you offer an EU-wide regime with its own regulator to impose standardised...

One point we sought to make was that, while Article 50 deals with withdrawal from the EU, did not create a right for a member state to leave the European Union. It simply recognised the right already extant in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Crucially,...

It is rather interesting that, despite Ukip being splattered all over the silly season media, when this blog joins in with a small fraction of the volume of analysis, we get rushes of comment suggesting that we should stop focusing on the party and get down to the...

With a minimum of ten MEPs (we actually got 12), I calculated we could top-slice their staff allocations and with political group funding, we could have put together a full-time team of 20 researchers - and more with interns. And with that team, we could be churning...