Yes, absolutely. I didn’t tell David, the editor, which way I voted and I’m not going to tell you. I challenged him to work it out from the text and he said he couldn’t. I’ve tried to be equal opportunities in being as rude as possible about people on both sides of the equation. It’s a recent, very evenhanded and very detailed look at the issues. Of course it’s hamstrung by the fact that this is very much an ongoing thing. It is not looking at the past in the way that for example Tim Shipman book is looking at something that has happened. His conclusions may well be out of date through no fault of his own. For a long time no one ever talked about politics. It was a boring thing to be endured every general election. Suddenly it was everywhere.” The Brexit negotiations that began in earnest in early 2017 proved tortuous and complex, eventually leading to the end of Theresa May’s government in the summer of 2019 after she repeatedly failed to push her deal through the House of Commons. This account from early 2019 by an economic historian then at Oxford University explains the evolution of the eu and Britain’s belated membership, before moving on to tell the story of the referendum and Mrs May’s negotiating troubles. Its only fault is that it stops at the end of 2018, when it was still not clear whether any deal at all would be done. An update would be valuable, even if the history became (slightly) less short. And does it argue that the divisions were about identity and that economics was very much subordinate?

It was clearly an appalling outcome and reflects very badly on VW and very badly on European regulators. But it’s not clear, to me, how it would necessarily have been different if the UK had been doing the regulation. Certainly, it was the UK political process that was responsible for the tax privileges that diesel has had in the UK. That’s the main reason we have an air pollution crisis in London now that is killing thousands of people a year. For the last 25 years, we’ve got tax policy on diesel wrong and it’s had very, very damaging consequences. But those decisions were taken in the UK Treasury—they weren’t taken in Brussels. Will we do better if we do this sort of thing in the UK? Maybe, maybe not. We just don’t know. of both the EU and UK and which is both stimulating and anxiety-inducing.' - Professor Richard Whitman, Head of School, Professor of Politics and International Relations, Director of the Global Europe Centre, University of Kent I think one of the reasons it is so divisive is that we’ve got, fundamentally, two countries here.” Brexit and Beyond provides a fascinating (and comprehensive) analysis on the how and why the UK has found itself on the path to exiting the European Union. The talented cast of academic contributors is drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and areas of expertise and this provides a breadth and depth to the analysis of Brexit that is unrivalled. The volume also provides large amounts of expert-informed speculation on the future of both the EU and UK and which is both stimulating and anxiety-inducing.' Lastly, we have the novel Autumn by Ali Smith. It’s been described in The New York Times as, “the first great Brexit novel.”Headlines such as the Daily Mail’s exhortation for Brexiteers to “Crush the saboteurs” during Theresa May’s snap general election campaign in 2017, or its earlier denunciation of judges as “Enemies of the people” are among those to catch in the nostrils. They are startling reminders of the depths to which elements of British media and politics sank. Drawing on the expertise of 28 leading scholars from a range of disciplines, Brexit and Beyond offers various different perspectives on the future of Europe, charting the likely effects of Brexit across a range of areas, including institutional relations, political economy, law and justice, foreign affairs, democratic governance, and the idea of Europe itself. Whilst the contributors offer divergent predictions for the future of Europe after Brexit, they share the same conviction that careful scholarly analysis is in need – now more than ever – if we are to understand what lies ahead for the EU. What economists are saying is that leaving the European Union is very likely going to lead to a reduction in the UK’s trade, and that that reduction in trade is very likely to make us less prosperous than we otherwise would have been. In the first instance, Tombs is too true to his profession to peddle the Brexiter myth that continued membership of the EU was incompatible with the historic identity of “our island nation”. He knows that other European countries have “histories of struggles for independence and democracy at least as proud as our own, but which so far they find compatible – if with some strain – with European integration”.

Leave were very, very good at pushing emotional buttons because people do vote emotionally. No one’s got the time to sit down and look through political manifestos, unless they’ve really got nothing else to do. People do vote with their hearts. He understood this. For what it’s worth, Foster’s analysis appears to be largely shared by Keir Starmer and his team, and it is to them as much as a wider readership that this book is directed. If they are looking for a Brexit strategy that is both grounded in reality and offers not a magic bullet but a picture of how things could be genuinely better, they could do a lot worse. This is important: the number of people on either side of the argument who actually understand the EU and what it does is pretty minimal. I include Remainers in that quite as much as Leavers. a strong line-up of contributors is to be found in Uta Staiger and Benjamin Martill’s (eds.) Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe (UCL, 2018). It looks at many of the challenges to the EU, including those mentioned above, but through a Brexit lens. This doesn’t mean the other crises are diminished in importance. Far from it. But the effect of Brexit on the future of the EU and Europe’s wider institutional structures is carefully assessed.’ It’s quite interesting because Hannan has been a member of the European Parliament for a long time. He sits on the committees which supposedly discuss free trade agreements and all this detailed stuff that the EU does when making trade agreements with other countries. And, yet, when it comes to these very simple things, he just makes things up. It’s just not true. I find that very odd.A superbly written chronicle of how Britain chaotically cut ties with its closest economic partners. Chris Grey’s rigorous analysis of how Brexit unfolded should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about politics.” Shona Murray, Europe correspondent, Euronews Most people do not live in big cities or remote rural villages. They live in greater suburbia/small-to-medium sized towns. ” Talking about the opportunities for global trade after Brexit, let’s turn to the first book on your list, which is Daniel Hannan’s What Next: How to get the best from Brexit. He has visions of the UK becoming like Singapore or Hong Kong and entering a new era of free trade and prosperity. Why have you chosen this as a good book to read on Brexit? A few years ago I wrote a thing for a client about the world in 2050 and mischievously—and without any kind of evidence—suggested that Europe would split North-South, with the French in the middle trying frantically to decide whether they were northern or southern. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians, the French to a degree, the Greeks, look at life in a very different way from the British, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Belgians, the Dutch.