Coming soon: kenneth.scot

Are Rejoiners ready to sell today’s EU?

The European Movement UK has the stated aim of fighting to rejoin the EU “as soon as it is politically possible”, an aim which I support. However, the EU that the UK would be rejoining is different to that which it left - both because the UK would almost certainly no longer enjoy its previous array of opt-outs, and because the EU has already moved on since Brexit happened. (The only opt-out one can envisage the UK potentially re-obtaining is that from the Schengen area, and then only because of Ireland’s opt-out and the need to keep the Irish border open - though Ireland could instead choose to insist on UK Schengen membership as a condition for the UK’s accession.) In the economic arena in particular, the European project (a term many UK pro-Europeans shy away from using) continues to move forward, with developments in the following three areas fundamentally changing the character of the EU membership which the UK left behind. The euro The euro is of course not ...

Why the whole UK should emulate Switzerland's pragmatism and join the EU SPS area

As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated in stark terms, one of the fundamental responsibilities of the state is the protection of public health. While governments are of course exercised by the threat posed by anthroponotic pathogens (like SARS-CoV-2 or HIV now are), they are equally concerned about pathogens transmitted from or between animals and plants (not least of all because human pandemic viruses can originate in the animal kingdom), as well as more broadly about anything which might endanger human, animal or plant life or health. For this reason, governments impose so-called sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures . SPS measures are regulatory measures designed to protect humans from pathogens and contaminants carried by animals and plants, and to protect the animals and plants themselves from such pathogens and contaminants. (For clarity, SPS measures do not concern the protection of humans from transmissible diseases within the human population, which may be achieved with...

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act shouldn’t be repealed - it should be made more Scottish. Here’s how

At the end of this month, almost four years after that now infamous referendum, the United Kingdom will almost certainly leave the European Union. However, beyond the small matters of Brexit and the country’s future relationship with the EU, 2020 is likely to be a year of significant constitutional change for the UK in other respects - in particular, the moving forward with the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 , as promised by the Conservatives (and Labour) in their 2019 general election manifesto, and further trailed in the second Queen’s Speech of last year. The popular view is that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is bad legislation - monstrous and Kafkaesque even - which should be purged from the UK statute book at the earliest opportunity. In the most simplistic version of this school of thought, we would simply return to the status quo ante, where prime ministers could call elections on a whim for naked partisan advantage - the great British traditional way (thoug...

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