Nick Tyrone
@NicholasTyrone
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Neoliberal Centrist Dad, hoping British politics sobers up eventually. Author of several books. Research Director @TheJobsFndn.
Joined July 2012
I think the one political figure I’ve changed my mind about the most over the last decade is Gordon Brown. I thought he was a poor prime minister at the time but looking back, he seems like a moral, intellectual and political giant compared with what followed.
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Liz Truss being booted out of No 10 by her own MPs before Christmas is looking both increasingly probable and increasingly funny.
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The Daily Mail putting that picture of Keir Starmer eating a curry in 2015 - with a deceased Frank Dobson cropped out - within their “currygate” story is another low-point in British political journalism in a month full of them.
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Closing food banks "in honour of the Queen" seems like a really, genuinely, morosely awful idea. I sort of feel like everyone has gone a bit mad here.
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Some Brexiters have got in touch to tell me I’m making stuff up when I say that Vote Leave campaigned on the idea that Brexit would mean shorter wait times for medical treatment. So, here is the evidence:.
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I thought Truss would be a terrible prime minister but never in my wildest dreams did I think her premiership would melt down this spectacularly, this quickly. It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen in politics.
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If Britain had remained in the EU, Cornwall would have got £300m over the next 3 years in structural funding. Instead, the UK government is giving Cornwall £132m, ie £168m less than if we'd Remained. Another Brexit promise broken and another example of how we're worse off out.
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63% of Britons now want to rejoin the EU. And that’s with no major, nationwide party advocating rejoin. Extraordinary.
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We’re only three days into the new Labour government and the most amazing thing to me is how much worse Sunak’s government already looks in hindsight. It really was shockingly poor.
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Spotted in a bookstore in the City of London just now…
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The Daily Telegraph boasting in loving terms about how Jacob Rees-Mogg's office desk has no computer on it says so much about both this government and why Brexit happened.
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Starmer is the prime minster of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Farage is the Member of Parliament for Clacton. There is a job description difference between those jobs in terms of being abroad for work purposes. Glad to help.
Starmer has mocked Farage for going to the USA. It’s a bit rich seeing as the Prime Minister has spent almost 4 weeks abroad of his 18 weeks in power and is the man supposedly running the country.
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My daughter is 11 and for kids her age, “Brexit” has become a pejorative adjective. So, a kid who comes to football practice with beaten up looking trainers gets them called “Brexit boots”. I don’t think Brexiters consider the degree to which they’ve lost the next generation.
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A pretty damning first five years of Brexit, quantified here rather neatly.
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It would be the end of the Conservative Party, not the Labour Party.
🚨BREAKING: Conservative insiders say Elon Musk is preparing to send Reform UK a $100M donation, claim the Times. This would be the END for Labour.
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The Soviets tried to split the west for over 70 years and failed. Trump's managed to do it in less than two months.
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The Tory MP accidentally stepping in human excrement while in Kent to see the massive lorry queues is such an on the nose metaphor for Brexit, I’m struggling to believe it really happened.
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I think it’s fair to say that if you have a swastika tattooed on any portion of your body, labelling you as far-right is fair enough.
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David Cameron holding an In/Out referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union has to count as the greatest political blunder ever made by a politician. It destroyed his political career, his legacy and slowly but surely, his party.
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I don’t understand why the backbench MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip is in Kyiv meeting the Ukrainian government. He “pledges help” - by what means exactly?.
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They still don’t understand what Brexit means, do they.
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I hate it when Brexiters say "Brexit was never going to be easy and no one ever said it would be." Um, you lot did, over and over gain, in 2016 in particular. You said it would be the easiest thing in the world and there would be no downsides to it.
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Serious question for Brexiteers: how is it even theoretically possible for the French to "cancel Christmas" if Britain has "taken back control"? Explain this paradox to me, please.
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The idea that Boris Johnson has paid “a high enough price already” and therefore the Partygate probe should be mercifully dropped is just the latest example of “the rules should be different for him”.
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No one alive today, unless they are 102 years old at youngest, fought in the Second World War for Great Britain. It remains the greatest boomer fantasy that any of them did this given the number of them that actually did is verifiably zero.
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Brexit is not being "thwarted" by secret enemies. We do not have a "Remainers Brexit", such a thing does not exist. What we have is the Brexit Boris Johnson and Lord Frost negotiated on our behalf, a hard Brexit like the core Brexiters shouted for, and it's terrible.
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Complaints from some that EU citizens get “preferential treatment” over UK citizens at EU immigration points in Spain. Yes, because UK citizens lost their freedom of movement when we left the EU. This isn’t that difficult to understand. If you don’t like it, question Brexit.
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With the best will in the world, I don't see how it's France's fault that we left the EU and decided to end freedom of movement for ourselves.
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I agree with so many Tories on here that Boris Johnson is the right man to lead the Conservatives into the next general election. The difference being, I think that because I want the Conservative party to lose the next general election.
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The Chief Executive of EasyJet saying they’ve had 8,000 applications for jobs from EU citizens - and had to turn them down because of Brexit. Pre-Brexit, the market would have allowed this situation to resolve itself - now, it’s left to bad British governments to mess it all up.
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The UK not going along with the EU on the USB-C issue is classic Brexit: it makes complete logical sense from every perspective to flow with the EU on this one, but Brexitism demands that we always demonstrate how Britain can be different, even if it's different in a bad way.
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Labour and the Lib Dems not standing in places where they know they won't win isn't a sign of some sort of dirty deal being arranged. It's just a logical consequence of First Past the Post. If the Tories don't like it, they can change the voting system.
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A People Polling poll is out that has the Tories on 19%. 19. With Labour on 53%, a 34-point lead. If this actually happened at a general election, the Labour Party would have a 430 seat majority and the Tories would be left with four seats.
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There will come a day, not that far away, when the people of Great Britain will be in awe of the fact that near the end of the second decade of the 21st century, we picked a fight with every single neighbouring country because we wanted different coloured passports.
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Rees-Mogg's article in the Sun today gives the whole Brexit game away. An appeal for the everyman to do their bit as the government has no idea how to make Brexit work. "Your country needs you" he says, invoking WW1. We don't know how to make Brexit any good, please help us.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg says "the evidence that Brexit has caused trade drops is few and far between". Other than the evidence of the actual, official trade statistics, but they were produced by "experts", so can probably be discounted.
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I genuinely think Canada joining the EU is a brilliant idea that should be taken a lot more seriously. I can think of loads of upsides for both Canada and the EU - and I’m struggling to come up with any big downsides.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg is trying out the line this morning that goes, "With everything that's now happening in the world, doesn't the whole Partygate thing seem silly in retrospect?" - a predictable attempt to try and convince people the Sue Gray report is no longer relevant.
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I see the government has very quietly folded in the fishing dispute with the French. This is Brexit in a nutshell: the UK government makes a big noise, puffs out its chest - and then reality kicks in and a complete cave in ensues. It happens over and over again.
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“No boomers fought in WWII” is not a controversial take but a statement of fact, particularly given the generation is named after the “baby boom”’which took place once the war was over.
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Watching Yvette Cooper debate Suella Braverman is like watching Albert Einstein debating a goldfish.
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It's amazing that Labour are doing exactly what the populist right wants on immigration, and yet they get zero credit. Because politics has become a lot like supporting a football team, you just root for your guys whatever happens.
🚨 NEW: The Government has removed 16,400 illegal migrants since the election, the highest level seen since 2018.
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Brexit was based on four assumptions:.1. It would cause the EU to collapse. 2. We'd get all the benefits of the SM without having to follow the rules. 3. We'd get a great trade deal with the US. 4. There would be a painless solution to the NI problem. None of these happened.
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Yesterday, it became obvious that Rishi Sunak has now officially missed his chance of ever being prime minister.
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Before Brexit, British citizens had the right to live and work in 32 countries (taking UK as one country), in most cases with the same basic rights as citizens of those countries. Now, they have the right to live and work in two countries. That seems like a worse deal to me.
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The government are promoting the ability to sell British lamb into the US market after a 20 year ban as a “Brexit benefit”. Small problem: the ban was lifted for the UK and the EU at the same time. So, another “Brexit benefit” we didn’t actually need Brexit to enjoy.
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Love the line emerging already that Truss screwing up and U-turning on everything is a positive as it’s a sign that she’s a “maverick” and a “risk taker”, as opposed to signifying it’s very possible she has no idea what she’s actually doing.
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Macron’s approval ratings going up now. Trump may end up being the saviour of centrist politics in Europe, with right-wing populism becoming associated with Trump’s weak, erratic “leadership”. Silver linings and all that.
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Dominic Cummings is claiming on Twitter that Boris Johnson didn't even know what the Customs Union was until November 2020. The most remarkable thing about this is that it is not particularly remarkable.
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Brexit is going badly, but it's not because we haven't stripped away a bunch of EU derived regulations yet. And not because of some Remainer elite who don't believe in the project enough. It's going badly because it was a bad idea.
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To the average person in Britain, this is like something from Jupiter.
“To say no to President Trump would be to say no to God.”. Meet televangelist Paula White, who Donald Trump just appointed to lead the White House ‘Faith Office.’. This is not normal.
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The EU isn't being "mean" to Britain. It didn't force us to leave the EU, we left on our own. Our prime minister even picked the exact terms of how we would leave. If Brexiteers want to be upset with anyone, they should be angry with Boris Johnson, this is his deal.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that the reason the UK government has decided to delay the next round of Brexit red tape is because it would be “an act of self-harm”. Write your own punchline, folks.
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Love how some Tory MPs on here are trying to blame Channel 4 and Krishnan for how badly the Tory candidates came across last night, as if they had used woke magic to transform Mordaunt into a piece of wood and Truss into the villain from a Roald Dahl book.
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How does Boris Johnson reconcile the fact that he wants the best for Ukraine and this includes joining the EU as soon as possible, but that being outside of the EU is great for Britain?.
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One of my favourite Brexiteer lines is "If you like the EU so much why don't you go and live there?" Perhaps because Brexit removed my right to do so?.
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Over 60% of the British public now want to rejoin the EU. Brexit is falling apart faster than even I had expected.
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Still confused as to why Zelensky wants to join the EU so badly. Doesn't he realise that by doing so, he'll be throwing away the chance for Ukraine to sign a trade deal with Tuvalu, one designed exclusively for his country's needs?.
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I find this whole idea that "Britain was always going to vote to Leave" amusing. It's easy to forget that before the referendum, the vast majority of people in Britain didn't care about the UK's place in the EU one way or another. It was an artificially created demand.
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No, it is not time for Remainers to try and make Brexit work. It is time for Leavers to demonstrate the benefits of what they wanted and if they can’t do that, to admit they were wrong.
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A Brexiter writes: “The public voted for Brexit”. Yes, seven years ago. Democracies are allowed to change their minds. That’s what makes them democracies.
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There is now a majority for Brexit in only three seats across the whole of the country. Three. In 629 out of the 632 constituencies across Britain, more people agree with the statement "Britain was wrong to leave the EU" than disagree with it. Magnificent.
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To those Brexiters pointing out that Canada and New Zealand aren’t signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights, I would suggest you consult a map and figure out what is and isn’t Europe.
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Sunak losing his own seat on election night would be pure comedy gold.
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When Britain rejoins the EU, it will spark a renaissance in this country that will be something to see. Business and culture will quickly rejuvenate, shrugging off the Covid/Brexit era completely.
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It’s genuinely odd that somewhere along the way, women’s rights became a right-wing thing. The left should reflect on that a little.
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If clearly and verifiably lying to parliament from the despatch box ceases to be a resigning issue for every government minister, then we’ve effectively abolished the ministerial code.
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"Boris Johnson to 'come out all guns blazing' over hated Brexit deal as he eyes comeback," says the Daily Express. Just to be clear, that's the "hated deal" Johnson himself negotiated and agreed as prime minister. So, he's going to come out all guns blazing against himself?.
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Top marks to Tobias Ellwood for advancing Single Market re-entry. He’ll tons of grief from the headbangers and mindless BJ sycophants - but he’s right and will be proven so in the relatively near future.
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Lots of Tories are calling for Starmer to resign if he gets a fine despite the fact that Johnson got fined, while being PM no less, and they are still supporting him staying in the job. Some consistency in British politics would be nice, even just once in a while.
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Not that I have a particular problem with Matt Hancock losing the whip for abandoning his MP duties temporarily and going on I'm a Celebrity, but doesn't Boris Johnson go on extensive holidays while the House is sitting and yet faces no penalty for this?.
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Boris Johnson did indeed promise lower gas bills if we left the EU. Would be nice if at least one Brexit related promise was kept at some point.
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This three minutes and twelve second clip of GB News getting absolutely owned on Brexit is one of the best things I’ve seen on this site in a while.
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Name one freedom that Brexit gave to British individuals. Not the British state, but to British individuals themselves. I've never heard a cogent answer to this from a Brexiter, so go on, enlighten me. Meanwhile, I can name loads of things Brexit TOOK from British individuals.
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That Nadhim Zahawi interview. Wow. If you haven't seen it yet, just watch it. I want to say "new low for this government" but I sort of think we're past being able to make those sorts of value judgements now.
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Rory Stewart would have been a way better prime minister than either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. Weirdly, I think most Tories would agree with me, even if they could never say so in public.
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Much to the annoyance of its detractors, the EU has proved its worth a few times over during the past several days.
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"Macron endlessly uses Brexit as an example of the sort of disaster he believes France would face if it fails to re-elect him," reads the Daily Mail. Perhaps because this is an effective way to campaign given Brexit looks like a total disaster to anyone outside of the UK?.
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I’m genuinely confused as to what the MP for Dover thinks is causing massive traffic congestion in her constituency if it isn’t Brexit, or at the very least the Brexit this government chose to enact.
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Keir Starmer isn't going to call a general election. He just isn't. More to the point, he shouldn't. We had an election six months ago. Stop being silly.
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I don’t think pensioners who own houses worth more than a million pounds and who are fairly wealthy beyond that should have their heating subsidised by the state.
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David Cameron could have just rode out the UKIP storm and not committed to an EU referendum. Worst that would have happened for him was another coalition with the Lib Dems. Instead, he set in motion a chain of events that will destroy the Conservative Party.
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To all the Remoaners: we now have fast-tracked entry to Portugal. Brexit benefit - check! All right, yes, we had fast-tracked entry to every EU country pre-Brexit, I get that. But can’t you just ever accept these amazing Brexit benefits without questioning every little detail?.
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One of the weirdest things about Brexit is that it was inspired by an anger and resentment towards the political class of this country, but in practice has handed that same political class way, way more power than it had before Brexit.
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The Policing Bill has passed through parliament and will shortly receive Royal Assent. Everyone's ability to protest, whether they be from the right or left, has now been been greatly affected. That this government can still claim to care so much about free speech is laughable.
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Controversial take: I don’t give the slightest toss what Elon Musk’s father thinks about how Britain is governed and find it baffling that anyone would.
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The idea that there is currently no one else in the United Kingdom who is better qualified to lead the country than Boris Johnson is one of the more transparently ludicrous ideas the modern Conservative Party has ever tried to push on the British public.
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All of the Tory leadership hopefuls appear to be under the misapprehension that we’ve had a Labour government for the last 25 years and we need a Tory PM at long last for a “fresh start”.
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The fact that the UK is the only G7 country that is in recession is either due Brexit, the useless nature of our government or both.
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This seems to have come as a shock to some, but it turns out if you trigger Article 50, then spend the two years running down the clock on the presumption that the EU will fold on all your demands at the end, you don't end up with a very good trade deal after all.
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Imperial measurements weren't banned jn the UK when we were in the EU. That's why you could buy pints in a pub and the road signs are still in miles, not kilometres. Imperial measurements aren't being "brought back in"; for whole parts of life, they never left. A dead cat story.
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Finally read all 106 pages of the government's "Brexit benefits" policy paper. It's filled with things we could have done while still in the EU, stuff this government can't or won't really do, and things that are actively harmful to the country. Is this all there is to Brexit?.
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I know I’ve echoed this sentiment before, but it always bears repeating: if Brexit relies entirely on one man being prime minister, particularly someone as chaotic as Boris Johnson, then it really can’t have very much to it as an idea.
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However you try and spin the Owen Paterson suspension vote today, what we are seeing is a government whipping its own MPs to make parliament less accountable to the people, as well as making corruption by MPs both more likely and less able to be punished when it happens.
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It looks like Suella Braverman is going to be Home Secretary again. Which blows the whole "Sunak as the man of moderation and reason" shtick out of the water for me.
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Is it strictly a British thing to have large portions of your population indulge in nostalgia for objectively rubbish things, such as not having enough heat to keep warm, or living in a city in which bombs intermittently rain down? Do other nations experience this phenomenon?.
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A Brexiter asked me what the “good bit” of being an EU member is. Being in the largest single market in the world and having the right to live and work in 30 other countries is the good bit.
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