The authoritative source for independent research on UK-EU relations

22 Dec 2021

Politics and Society

Test your knowledge of all things EU, UK, EU-UK and more in our Christmas pub quiz! Although there’s no pub and no one to check if you’re cheating (of course you wouldn’t), we’ll be posting questions throughout the week on different subjects related to our research and areas of interest and we challenge you to see how many answers you can get right. Today’s round: Who Said It? in our Brexit Witness Archive! A key is posted below the questions. Answers will be revealed on Thursday 23 December. Good luck!

  1. “The US will want to have a good relationship with the UK, but I can tell you that they look with great scepticism at this administration and what can usefully be achieved with it. What has really gone down badly in Washington, and in Dublin, is the seeming instrumentalisation of the anger of some elements of the Loyalist community for the purposes of attacking the EU.”David O’Sullivan 
  2. “I questioned. I said, ‘Do we really want to get into a situation where we are plumping so heavily on one side that might well divide the party?’”John McDonnell 
  3. “It just felt that the whole focus of the Remain campaign was on such a transactional economic basis that didn’t touch people’s deeper sense of the values of Britain and so forth.”Caroline Lucas 
  4. “The vision is of a free trading, sovereign Britain that is friendly with its neighbours, and it seems to have been more difficult to get there than we thought.”David Frost 
  5. “Sadly, relatively few Westminster politicians are interested in Northern Ireland. That reflects – let’s be blunt about it – their constituents’ thinking, as well.”David Lidington 
  6. “The fact that it looked like a Conservative versus Conservative contest was disastrous for us, because I think a lot of the public just thought we were saying, ‘Do you like David Cameron?’ and there were plenty of people, it turned out, who didn’t.”Amber Rudd 
  7. “The vast majority [in DExEU] had never really done any EU work before. For the ones that had, it had been pretty limited. So there was a massive lack of specialism and expertise which, as you all know, is a wider issue around the civil service.”Raoul Ruparel 
  8. “I wasn’t very confident about the indicative votes. But I mean, in the circumstances, they were a potential way forward – although of course we ended up with nothing very much really being indicated.”Dominic Grieve 
  9. “Barnier made no secret of the fact that he didn’t enjoy interacting with Northern Ireland Unionist politicians… and that he didn’t think they respected the process or, perhaps, him.”Julian King 
  10. “The majority of Labour Party members voted Remain and lived in Remain seats. Sometimes it is easier to say what the members want to hear, regardless of the political consequences.” : Caroline Flint 
  11. “I remember turning to him [David Cameron] in the lobby on one of the referendum votes, and saying, ‘What are we voting on? Why am I in the same lobby as you? I shouldn’t be in this lobby with you?’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t know.’ And I just thought, ‘If the Prime Minister doesn’t know exactly what we’re voting on, as a newly-elected Member of Parliament, I felt slightly better, that maybe I wouldn’t always be across the detail every single time.’” : Jess Phillips 
  12. “As far as the Union was concerned, some damage was inevitable. If such an important country leaves the European Union, there is damage, of course. The question was about damage limitation.” : Jim Cloos 
  13. “I think, in the overall big picture, Parliament has been weakened because, in the end, unless you have totally codified rules that protect Parliament’s position, what ultimately is the biggest determinant of Parliament’s strength is the size of the majority. And because the Government’s majority is so large, Parliament is relatively weak.”John Bercow
  14. “After Theresa May called her general election and lost her majority, everything changed. That extraordinary period of two and a half years was one in which the Government had no confidence it could win any vote on anything.” : Hilary Benn 
  15. “If you look now, why have we left the European Union? Is it because we’re now going to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership? We’re going to be rule takers and not rule makers when it comes to another trade agreement on the other side of the world.”Emily Thornberry 

Who Said it… 

… in UK in a Changing Europe’s ‘Brexit Witness Archive’? 

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