What Stalin, the Stuarts and Lidl lobsters can tell us about the EU

What does the EU have in common with the USSR and England under the early Stuarts? And why should the price of Lidl lobster tell us anything about how it works? The answers are in this week’s magazine.

What doesthe EU have in common with the Soviet Union? What does it have in common with the governments run by England's early Stuarts? What makes it look a bit like pre-revolutionary France? And why should the price of Lidl lobster (£4.99) tell us anything about how it works? The answers are all in this week's magazine.

This week,I talk to Bernard Connolly, a man who knows more about the EU than perhaps anyone should. For him the EU is an empire-building bureaucracy that takes freedom and sovereignty from its nation states and offers little but crony capitalism in return.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.