Lord Hannan made IEA chief April 24, 2026 The Institute of Economic Affairs has announced Lord Daniel Hannan as its new director general. Hannan, a former Tory MEP who was one of the top Vote Leave figures in 2016, will take up the post on 1 June 2026. He has long been an avid critic of the EU and was one of the [...]
BRC chief: Red tape ‘weighs heavily’ on retailers April 23, 2026 Helen Dickinson, the boss of leading trade body the British Retail Consortium, believes red tape “weighs heavily” on retailers. She speaks to Felix Armstrong about food inflation, workers’ rights and her meeting with the Chancellor. Helen Dickinson was six weeks into her job as chief executive of the BRC when the horsemeat scandal landed on [...]
UK rejoins Erasmus: British students to study across Europe from 2027 April 16, 2026 Six years after Brexit, British students will soon be able to study and work across Europe again, as the UK formally re-joins the Erasmus programme. The legal text, signed in Brussels on Wednesday, is intended to bring the UK back into the programme in 2027 after the UK pulled out of in December 2020 as [...]
Rejoining the single market by stealth is a danger to democracy April 14, 2026 Keir Starmer once accused conservatives of “silencing parliament” by using Henry VIII powers. Now he’s doing the exact same thing, says Alys Denby Denby pottery and Gentleman’s Relish: two icons have gone to the wall in recent weeks. One I’m taking personally. The loss of these brands leaves our commercial landscape a little blander and [...]
Keir Starmer believes undoing Brexit will solve Britain’s problems – he’s wrong April 6, 2026 The only way Starmer can get everything he wants from a relationship “reset” with Brussels is by rejoining the EU, says Eliot Wilson This Wednesday is the anniversary of Britain and France signing the Entente cordiale in 1904. It was actually three separate agreements, ostensibly dealing with colonial boundaries and fishing rights, but in practice [...]
Firms scramble to keep up as the UK prepares to align with EU food standards March 25, 2026 Fans of Clarkson’s Farm will know that, for British farmers, dealing with the EU presents an endless stream of headaches and paperwork. But things are changing fast – too fast, many worry – in the UK’s complex web of food production, and farmers and manufacturers are scrambling to meet changes in legislation coming down the [...]
What makes Rachel Reeves think she should be picking winners? March 20, 2026 Rachel Reeves’ vision for an “active and strategic” state is just old fashioned dirigisme with a new name, says Emmanuel Igwe A few hours before her Mais lecture this week, the chancellor had told Faisal Islam in an interview that she “so believed in an active and strategic state… working with working people to shape the [...]
Data mining exposes the tension between EU alignment and AI ambition March 18, 2026 When the EU sets rules that shape markets, supply chains and legal risk, the UK faces a choice: align, diverge, or drift. Too often, we drift. Text and data mining provides a neat example of how this drift might undermine our ambitions in AI, says Anand Menon For some people at least, Brexit was about [...]
UK has ‘done little to diverge’ from Europe since Brexit February 24, 2026 The UK has “done little to diverge” with the European Union on regulation since Brexit, a new report suggests, but that has not stopped the bloc’s own legislation increasing divergence between the two jurisdictions. Across a swathe of issues, analysts at UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) said the UK had cleaved much closer to [...]
UK payments stuck with ‘bolted on’ European regulation, says PSR boss February 2, 2026 The boss of the UK’s payments regulator has said the body’s consolidation with the City watchdog will allow it to ditch overhanging red tape from Europe. David Geale, who heads up the Payments System Regulator (PSR) and leads on payments at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), said: “There are bits of payments regulation that have [...]