Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The beleaguered May now faces another legal challenge to her stubborn insistence that she govern the Brexit process by Royal Prerogative. It appears that there is a strong legal opinion suggesting that leaving the EU will not automatically take GB out of the Europeans Economic Area, which is actually the free market extended to the likes of Norway. To exit that requires  triggering, so this opinion asserts, a certain Article 127 of a different treaty setting up the EEA.

Without wishing at this point to explore the merit of this interpretation, it casts yet another spanner into the works of a project at present going nowhere. This is because a Judicial Review is threatened causing more delay, which may end up with Parliament having a vote both on Article 50 and also on Article 127. Whilst most MPs have pledged to let Article 50 through once they have reviewed the terms, there would be no such assured majority for A127. Indeed many would argue that while the majority in the country voted for Brexit from the EU, they did not vote to leave  the EEA. Indeed recent opinion polls show a huge majority (90%) wanting to remain in the single market.

We now have a legal spider’s web, cabinet discord, no plan, the political weather changing in Europe and an increasingly restive population who feel they have voted for something which is not being delivered. This could turn nasty quite quickly. It is certainly the biggest UK political cock up for very many decades. Perhaps the biggest ever.

He was arguably the world’s best known politician. Cuba was a tiny island of little consequence but Castro put it in the forefront of the politics and tensions of the cold war. He ousted by armed force a cruel and despotic dictatorship which made most Cuban’s lives a misery (which was inexplicably backed by the US and allowed organized crime to more or less run the country). He transformed the lives of his people for the better, but he was a cruel dictator who tolerated no opposition, which he executed in large numbers. He soon fell out with the Americans and became friends with the Russians. The Cuban Missile Crisis gave him a star on the sidewalk of history.

The Americans hated the notion of a communist regime on their doorstep and did everything possible to oust him, including a blockade which has lasted fifty years, but he survived everything and became a hero to half the world. The other half reviled him as a wicked tyrant. He was a bit of both but in absolute terms neither and there will never be agreement about his life or his legacy. His elderly brother, more of a reformer but still a communist dictator, soldiers on, but the time surely approaches for America to end this pointless blockade which did no more that hurt the innocent Cuban people and cement the Castros in power. Without that childish blockade the Castro reign would have ended decades ago.