The fourth negotiating round between the UK and the EU has ended as expected, with both Michel Barnier and David Frost stating that no significant progress has been made. As with earlier negotiating rounds, Barnier read out a lengthy statement […]
CIB’s Annual General Meeting and Public Rally is normally held in April, but this year had to be postponed due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We informed our members and website readers at the time that we had provisionally re-arranged both […]
The Franco-German agreement on the EU’s Coronavirus ‘recovery fund’ is already being met with criticism from both sides of the Eurozone divide. This report from Germany explains Chancellor Merkel’s U-turn, and looks at the difficulties that still lie ahead in […]
CIB chairman Edward Spalton explains why the relentless centralisation of public health responsibilities from the 1970s onwards has undermined our ability to contain infectious diseases like COVID-19. We need to return to a more localised approach to enable effective measures […]
The UK government has published its plans for implementing the Northern Ireland Protocol (the ‘backstop’). Dr Graham Gudgin explains that the light touch regime it envisages sensibly resists the EU’s ‘maximalist’ demands, but that some difficulties will be unavoidable. This […]
The government’s draft Fisheries Framework Agreement, the text that sets out the UK’s position in negotiations with the EU over a future fisheries agreement, has now been made public. On a positive note the broad context outlined here looks good […]
