Bruges Group Blog

Thirty years ago, twenty-three Conservative Members of Parliament voted against the Maastricht Treaty. Our main concern was that it opened the door to the abolition of the Pound and its replacement with what became the euro. Some twenty-seven years later in two-thousand and nineteen, twenty-seven Conservative Members of Parliament voted against The...

Being ambushed on his birthday to listen to a small group singing 'Happy Birthday' and sip a glass of wine may have been foolish of the PM. It does not count as crime in rational people's book. 10 Downing Street is a huge office. The Police issued 126 fixed-penalty notices naming only three recipients. The other 123 were presumably issued to specia...

This week has been another shocking reminder how far adrift today's Conservative Party are from the principles enunciated and implemented by its greatest peacetime leader Margaret Thatcher. To me personally, this has been dramatically emphasised by the loss of Westminster City Council to the Labour Party. Some thirty years ago as the Finance Chairm...

Boris has offered his heart-felt apology to the nation for inadvertently breaking lockdown rules, for which he has been fined, but that is not enough for his political enemies unsurprisingly. Wednesday's PMQs were marked by a tiresome repetition by Opposition MPs demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister, using up precious parliamentary time ...

With Westminster politics now on shutdown until 21st February, we can finally draw breath and reflect on the rise of Keir Starmer's standing as a future Prime Minister, not least in opinion polls when benchmarked against Boris Johnson. Starmer is enjoying a sustained period of Labour leading the Tories in the opinion polls, since their self inflict...

Since Heath bamboozled us into joining the Common Market successive governments of all parties have treated the electorate and democracy with contempt. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, declared: "The Legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. For it being but a delegated power from the People, they who...

It has been a week of melodrama in the latest instalment of the soap opera that is the Conservative & Unionist Party. Talk of a "pork pie plot", so called as the Rutland & Melton MP, Alicia Kearns, one member of the 2019 new intake of Conservative MPs was allegedly pivotal in it, was seized on by the mainstream media whose appetite for the ...