Book picks similar to
Why Vote Leave by Daniel Hannan
politics
non-fiction
brexit
british-history
Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
Danny Dorling - 2019
Some promise the full story of the political manoeuvring that got us to this point, others promise to make sense of the vote, with a couple focusing on the supposed evils of immigration and Islam.In Rule Britannia, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson tell a different story. They argue that the EU referendum was part of a last gasp of empire working its way out of the British psyche. It is a view of empire largely based on myth and nostalgia.Dorling and Tomlinson are not arguing for any particular position, but suggest that whatever the next year brings Britain will be much diminished by the process of trying to leave the EU, and that there is no welcoming Empire, Commonwealth, or other set of countries, ready to quickly embrace new trading relationships with us. They do, however, recognise the potential to reshape a post-Brexit Britain, assuming that the UK can accept a world order not based on the past.
Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment
Yanis Varoufakis - 2017
Despite the mass support of the Greek people and the simple logic of his arguments, he succeeded only in provoking the fury of Europe’s political, financial and media elite. But the true story of what happened is almost entirely unknown – not least because so much of the EU’s real business takes place behind closed doors.In this fearless account, Varoufakis reveals all: an extraordinary tale of brinkmanship, hypocrisy, collusion and betrayal that will shake the deep establishment to its foundations.As is now clear, the same policies that required the tragic and brutal suppression of Greece’s democratic uprising have led directly to authoritarianism, populist revolt and instability throughout the Western world.'Adults In The Room' is an urgent wake-up call to renew European democracy before it is too late.
A Short History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop (Pelican Books)
Kevin H. O'Rourke - 2019
But, as Kevin O'Rourke writes, Brexit did not emerge out of nowhere: it is the culmination of events that have been under way for decades and have historical roots stretching back well beyond that. Brexit has a history.O'Rourke, one of the leading economic historians of his generation, explains not only how British attitudes to Europe have evolved, but also how the EU's history explains why it operates as it does today - and how that history has shaped the ways in which it has responded to Brexit. Why are the economics, the politics and the history so tightly woven together? Crucially, he also explains why the question of the Irish border is not just one of customs and trade, but for the EU goes to the heart of what it is about. The way in which British, Irish and European histories continue to interact with each other will shape the future of Brexit - and of the continent.Calm and lucid, A Short History of Brexit rises above the usual fray of discussions to provide fresh perspectives and understanding of the most momentous political and economic change in Britain and the EU for decades.
Life After the State
Dominic Frisby - 2013
In every instance where government gets involved in people's lives with a desire to do good, it can always be relied on to make the situation much, much worse. Yet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we imagine that a world without the state would be a wild and terrifying place. With wit and devastating clarity of argument, Frisby shows in this book that human nature proves the opposite to be true. Welcome to Life After the State. "Dominic Frisby has gone and done something extraordinary: written a page-turner on the economy. It's both readable and radical, a serious book that is, by turn, fascinating, alarming and contentious. At times, the book makes you want to shout its message from the rooftops; at others, it just makes you want to shout. Life after the State challenges so much of what we take for granted. It is a wake-up call for politicians, economists and us all, written with clarity, verve and, more than that, the restless passion of an intelligent, inquisitive malcontent. Read it." - James Harding, once editor of The Times now Director of BBC News and Current AffairsReviewThought-provoking and original, anyone concerned how big and bloated government has become must read this book. Dominic Frisby asks the kind of questions that those in Westminster need to start asking. - Douglas Carswell, MP We can't go on as we are. All politicians know that. But if they read Life After The State they might also start to understand what they might do about it. A must read for any thinking man or woman. - Merryn Somerset Webb, FT columnist and editor Moneyweek Magazine Things are so bad that in our time only a comedian can make sense of an economy based on printing money. Dominic Frisby's Life After the State is an accessible contemporary anarcho-capitalist critique of the mess we're in with pointers for our escape. - Guido Fawkes, political blogger It's incredibly readable and incredibly thought-provoking. - Al Murray, The Pub Landlord An entertaining cogent attack on state power, which should topple the centralist Trots once and for all. - Tom Hodgkinson, The IdlerAbout the AuthorDominic Frisby is now mostly a writer but has been a comedian, actor, voice-over artist, TV presenter, boxing ring announcer, florist, removal man, camp theatrical agent's PA, sports commentator and busker. The Guardian called his stand-up comedy 'viciously funny and inventive'.
May at 10
Anthony Seldon - 2019
May at 10 tells the compelling inside story of the most turbulent period in modern British politics for 100 years.Written by one of Britain’s leading political and social commentators, May at 10 describes how Theresa May arrived in 10 Downing Street in 2016 with the clearest, yet toughest, agenda of any Prime Minister since the Second World War: delivering Brexit. What follows defies belief or historical precedent. This story has never been told.Including a comprehensive series of interviews with May’s closest aides and allies, and with unparalleled access to the advisers who shaped her premiership, Downing Street’s official historian Anthony Seldon decodes the enigma of the Prime Minister’s tenure. Drawing on all his authorial experience, he unpacks what is the most intriguing government and Prime Minister of the modern era.
The Communist Manifesto/Wages, Price and Profit
Karl Marx - 1848
Written over 150 years ago in 1848, a period of history with great upheaval, it continues to be an important work on political economy, especially as we enter the dawn of the global economy. Politicians, business leaders, acamdemics and students of very different persuasions find the manifesto a basic and essential treatise to be understood. It has had a tremendous effect throughout history and will continue to influence the future of mankind. A Collector's Edition.
My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion
Michel Barnier - 2021
As the EU's chief negotiator, for four years Michel Barnier had a seat at the table as the two sides thrashed out what 'Brexit' would really mean. The result would change Britain and Europe forever.During the 1600 days of complex and often acrimonious negotiations, Michel Barnier kept a secret diary. He recorded his private hopes and fears, and gave a blow-by-blow account as the negotiations oscillated between consensus and disagreement, transparency and lies.From Brussels to London, from Dublin to Nicosia, Michel Barnier's secret diary lifts the lid on what really happened behind the scenes of one of the most high-stakes negotiations in modern history. The result is a unique testimony from the ultimate insider on the hidden world of Brexit and those who made it happen.
The Triumph Of The Political Class
Peter Oborne - 2007
Europe Recast: A History of European Union
Desmond Dinan - 2004
The author captures the dynamics of the evolving debates about European unity and examines the factors that led to today's union.
Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of
Mick Hume - 2017
Yet when the EU Referendum and American Elections both delivered the ‘wrong’ result, elites challenged the merit of the people’s will, and some even tried to block it. Preferring unelected institutions, from technocrats to the courts, self-appointed higher minds questioned whether voters are fit to be trusted with their own futures. Ours is the age of “I support democracy, but…”And yet the answer will never be to impose limitations. Popular democracy must offer better choices, rather than removing choice altogether. It’s time to defend democracy and fight for more it, with no ifs, buts or backtracks.
The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
Adam Tooze - 2014
In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and matériel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.A century after the outbreak of fighting, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, and its aftereffects. From the day the United States enters the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power.Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America’s centrality—including the slide into fascism—The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I.
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
Douglas Murray - 2017
Douglas Murray takes a step back and explores the deeper issues behind the continent's possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks and a global refugee crisis to the steady erosion of our freedoms. He addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel’s U-turn on migration, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe--one hopeful, one pessimistic--which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: "civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die."
The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies
John R. Lott Jr. - 2016
In The War on Guns, economist and gun rights advocate John Lott turns a skeptical eye to well-funded anti-gun studies and stories that perpetuate false statistics to frighten Americans into giving up their guns.
Cameron's Coup: How the Tories took Britain to the Brink
Polly Toynbee - 2015
Despite coalition compromises, he has turned out to be more radical than Margaret Thatcher.
She privatised industries. But he planned to dismantle the welfare state itself - starting with the NHS. The cuts signalled an assault on Britain's post-war social settlement.
Children, young people and the poor are bearing the brunt. Social welfare, police, council services, housing and legal aid are under fierce attack.
Will it succeed?
Writing with their trademark incisiveness and wit, Toynbee and Walker report how a party that failed to win a Commons majority has still been devastatingly effective. Blending analysis and statistics with moving human stories from Sydenham to Sheffield, Cameron's Coup argues that Britain is becoming meaner and harsher. The pressing question now is whether these changes are irrevocable.
The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning
Peter Hitchens - 2009
Left-wingers keenly support the bombing of Belgrade and the invasion of Iraq. Tories warn against the threat to civil liberties. The 'progressive' BBC gives a fair hearing to the Conservative Party. Socialist journalists turn and rend Ken Livingstone. In democratic London, merely expressing your opinion can be seriously bad for your career, while in autocratic Moscow you can say pretty much what you like, provided you don't do anything about it. The tearing down of the old Iron Curtain may have allowed markets to sweep into the old Warsaw Pact lands - but it has also permitted revolutionary left-wing ideas to spread like a bacillus through the 'West'.Nobody really cares any more about the old shibboleths of state ownership. The British Labour Party - which opposed nuclear weapons, supposedly on principle, when they mattered - is quite happy to spend billions on the same weapons now that they are unnecessary.The supposed 'right' is as confused and nonsensical as the supposed 'left'. Neo-conservatives run vast budget deficits at home and engage in utopian adventures abroad. They are actively opposed to old conservative ideas such as national sovereignty, strong families and rigorous selective education, and happy to bend the knee to left-wing orthodoxies from man-made global warming to egalitarianism.The political compass is broken, its needle swinging wildly and meaninglessly. The existing political parties have converged, or perhaps simply retreated in confusion on to what looked like safe territory, the often tried and repeated failed policies of Fabian Social Democracy, now worsened by 1960s sexual and social radicalism. They are no longer adversaries, their personnel are interchangeable and they struggle to find ways to distinguish themselves from each other. They simply ignore - or deny - huge areas of human experience and concern from mass immigration to the collapse of marriage and the disappearance of order and rigour in the state education system.Yet conventional wisdom continues to insist that formal politics can and should continue as it did before - and that an exasperated and increasingly angry electorate should place its hopes in a mere change of personnel at the next election. Peter Hitchens argues for the re-establishment of proper adversary politics and the rediscovery of principle.