In last week’s post, we discussed some of the social media content of the various groups contesting the EU referendum. While social media is an important part of the campaigning, it is not the only part, so this week our focus shifts to the wider set of materials that the groups produce. Our sample is […]
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Thanks to the foresight that all academics are blessed with, I find myself almost half the world away from the UK this week, just as everyone seems to be having a brief pause before next week’s European Council. I might pretend that my Canadian and American colleagues here on the West Coast are pestering me […]
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Referendums are odd beasts in the menagerie of democracy. On the one hand, they can see seen as one of the purest forms of democratic participation, giving every voter a direct say on a matter of importance. On the other, they force debate into a very simplified binary outcome, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a question […]
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And so we come to the crunch. A text for the UK’s renegotiation finally exists and in just a couple of weeks we might have an agreement and a timetable for a referendum. And so far, David Cameron looks like he’s doing alright. This ‘alrightness’ comes at several different layers, each of which is worth […]
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Despite the best protestations of senior ministers, there is a definite sense that the British government is working very hard to get a deal signed off at next month’s European Council. David Cameron’s rescheduling of a trip to Scandinavia to meet Jean Claude Juncker instead is just the latest marker of this. Part of the […]
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Everyone’s favourite parlour-game – “when’s the referendum going to be?” – continues unabated, with no-one claiming the prize a mere nine months into the discussion. The combination of a British prime minister unwilling to set out very specific demands from his renegotiation, a Foreign Office apparently unwilling to commit anything to paper, plus the rest of […]
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