Teaching Comparative Government

PM May tries to explain why Brexit is a good idea to the association of the UK's top business people at the Confederation of British Industry meeting. Brexit plan will stop EU migrants 'jumping the queue' Theresa May is renewing her efforts to sell her draft Brexit withdrawal agreement - saying it will stop EU migrants "jumping the queue". She said migration would become skills-based, with Europeans no longer prioritised over "engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi". The PM also insisted to business leaders at the CBI that the withdrawal deal had been "agreed in full"… There has been widespread criticism of the draft 585-page withdrawal agreement - and the short paper setting out what the UK and EU's future relationship could look like - which are set to be finalised and signed off at an EU summit this weekend. Two of the prime minister's cabinet ministers resigned over the proposed deal, while others are believed to...

Pro-Brexit politicians deny that Britain's economy will be damaged by leaving the EU. Anti-Brexit pols will point to the closing of a Michelin factory in Scotland. Michelin workers' shock at factory closure Dundee Michelin factory workers have spoken of their shock after the company announced its intention to close the plant, with the loss of all 845 jobs. The tyre factory will close by mid-2020 after the French firm deemed it "unsuitable" in the current climate… Michelin Dundee manager John Reid said… "Clearly we have been operating in a very difficult market context for more than a year. "We've had our volume cut three times this year. "This year we actually produced the lowest volume we've ever produced in the factory, so it was clear that something fairly fundamental was happening."… The union Unite has said the closure would be a "hammer-blow" to the city. Michelin said the Dundee site, which opened in 1971 and specialised ...

A possible election in the UK may be scheduled at the time of an election in the USA. British PM Theresa May 'planning snap election' in November British Prime Minister Theresa May is planning an early general election in November to save her leadership and to prevent the collapse of talks with European leaders over Britain's exit from the bloc, according to a report by the Sunday Times newspaper. The report comes just days after EU leaders rejected the Conservative party leader's preferred plan for leaving the EU, the so-called Chequers agreement. Under that plan, the United Kingdom would enter into a free trade area with the European Union, which would have common rules and standards in several major industries, and maintain customs duties regulations but end freedom of movement between EU member states and the UK. EU leaders dismissed the proposals as unworkable at a meeting they attended with May in Salzburg earlier this week. The Sunday Times spoke to two senior ...

Does age bring wisdom? Or does youth imply knowledge of how the modern world works? Why the opinions don't necessarily translate into policy? How young and old would vote on Brexit now Few issues divide opinions between different age groups quite as sharply as Brexit. And it could be that the differences are becoming even more pronounced… If there were to be a second referendum now, 52% would vote Remain and 48% Leave, an average of polls over the past three months suggests… So, it is a stable picture, albeit one that reverses the position in 2016. But the opinions of voters vary dramatically across different groups - none more so than between young and old. Just over 70% of 18 to 24-year-olds who voted in the referendum backed Remain, four major academic and commercial polls conducted shortly after the ballot agree, with just under 30% backing Leave. In contrast, only 40% of those aged 65 and over supported Remain, while 60% placed their cross against Leave. These younger and o...

PM May's plans for Brexit survived on a vote in Commons because several Labour MPs voted for her bill. The future looks rocky. Britain’s May narrowly avoids defeat in parliament on EU trade laws British Prime Minister Theresa May narrowly avoided a defeat in parliament at the hands of pro-EU lawmakers from her own party on Tuesday, fending off a rebellion that had threatened to deepen a crisis over her Brexit strategy. Parliament voted 307 to 301 against an amendment to trade legislation [that]… was seen as a test of May’s ability to deliver a smooth British exit from the European Union and keep her job… One Conservative lawmaker present told Reuters that the party whips whose job it is to enforce discipline, desperate to win the vote, had threatened to call a confidence vote in May if she lost, a move that could bring down the government… May is expected to face many more challenges to her strategy after a summer break as she works her way through a mountain of Brexit-related l...

At least, Brexit is more complicated than it was in the referendum. Facing Defeat on Brexit, May Gives Ground to U.K.’s Parliament Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, on Tuesday promised greater control for Parliament over withdrawal from the European Union, after a threatened rebellion by lawmakers forced her into a new and potentially significant retreat in the country’s troubled exit from the bloc. Brexit protesters in London The day began on an ominous note with the resignation of one of Mrs. May’s ministers over her plans for withdrawal, known as Brexit, and got steadily worse for the prime minister when some of her rebel lawmakers combined with opposition parties, posing the threat of a damaging defeat. The vote concerned an amendment that had been added by the House of Lords to Mrs. May’s main Brexit legislation. The amendment would have given lawmakers more control over the process… Mrs. May had appealed to lawmakers not to support the amendment, arguing that it would weak...

The complications involved in the progress toward Brexit keep growing. Did Brexit campaigners cheat? And if they did, what does that mean? Sanni If he knocked on your door, Shahmir Sanni might not be what you would expect of a campaigner for Brexit… Sanni is a young, hip, gay Muslim, a Pakistani Briton who studied economics at his university, loves fashion and is an American-style libertarian, a committed “euroskeptic.”… Once an anonymous college-age volunteer, Sanni is now front-page news in Britain, as a whistleblower who alleges that pro-Brexit campaigners in 2016 “cheated” — specifically that a prominent group run by top Tories, including now-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, broke election law by coordinating campaigns among allied organizations to circumvent spending caps. The political firm at the center of the controversy is Aggregate IQ, a tiny Canadian firm closely connected to Cambridge Analytica… The week-long controversy over who did what and how in the 2016 Brexit vote...