Project Fear: The Novel that Never Was
- July 13, 2020
- by
- Matt
All writers know that not all their ideas get off the ground. Sometimes you come up with an idea that you think has potential, but then your agent or publisher says no for all kinds of reasons that you don’t anticipate. So here’s what happened with a pitch that I failed to launch a while...
Broken English
- March 01, 2020
- by
- Matt
So the government has released its post-Brexit ‘points-based’ immigration system, and no one will be surprised to hear that ‘All applicants, both EU and non-EU citizens, will need to demonstrate that they have a job offer from an approved sponsor, that the job offer is at the required skill level, and that they speak...
Independence Day
- January 31, 2020
- by
- Matt
More than four years after the referendum that plunged the UK into what has been the most bitter and divisive political crisis in its history, we have finally reached the day that so many Brexiters have dreamed of and yearned for. For many of those who voted and campaigned to leave the European Union, today...
The Strange Tale of the Disappearing Country
- September 22, 2019
- by
- Matt
I’ve been abroad in the Pyrenees for nearly three weeks now and it was, as it always is these days, a huge relief to be away from these septic isles. Of course you don’t forget them. Nowadays, you take Brexit with you in your mental baggage, even if you never meant to pack it. It’s...
From Brexit to Trump: The Incredible Shrinking Countries
- August 11, 2019
- by
- Matt
I’m not much of a fan of the concept of ‘national greatness’. It’s not I don’t think that nations can have qualities and achievements worthy of pride and admiration. But the concept of national greatness is almost always steeped in a collective narcissism and national chauvinism that I find unedifying and inherently repellent.
Its proponents often...
The Tory Party Has Gone Missing
- June 21, 2019
- by
- Matt
Some readers may have heard of the mass hallucinations that took place at the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951. As John Grant Fuller describes it in The Day of Saint Anthony’s Fire, on 15 August that year the entire village of 250 inhabitants woke up and began seeing visions. One man sat down to...
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