“The good news: President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz seems to have confirmed his commitment to a single seat for the European Parliament in a Swedish radio interview (very short summary from EUObserver here ). Problem: he wants the seat to be Strasbourg and not Brussels. While such an […]
The good news: President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz seems to have confirmed his commitment to a single seat for the European Parliament in a Swedish radio interview (very short summary from EUObserver here). Problem: he wants the seat to be Strasbourg and not Brussels. While such an arrangement […]
I’ve been having a look at Europarl TV, launched yesterday with a bit of fanfare in Brussels. I was not at the launch so I didn’t profit from a few glasses of wine to temper my views on the project. I instead watched a bit of the news show this […]
MEPs are having a whinge that a French rail strike is going to make it hard for them to get from Strasbourg when this week’s European Parliament plenary session ends. Struan Stevenson, a UK Tory, has complained that France doesn’t exactly make it easy for European Parliamentarians to get to […]
The UK Green MEPs in the European Parliament have commissioned a report showing how much CO2 the monthly travelling circus to Strasbourg produces – 20000 tonnes to be precise, as much as flying 13000 people across the Atlantic and back. See The Independent, and Jonathan Newton’s blog. I’m actually quite […]
It’s every MEP’s nightmare. It’s every MEP’s assistant’s worst nightmare. It makes the European Parliament horribly inefficient, and it costs European taxpayers a load of cash. Oh, and it keeps the hotel and restaurant business in a certain part of France very happy. I am of course talking of Strasbourg, […]
In January 2013 I stumbled upon Polish MEPs employing a lot of assistants. One employed 19 people, and two employed 17 each back then. The blog entry about that is here, and it was even covered by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Today the issue has been raised once more, as […]
An association for European Young Entrepreneurs. Sounds like a fine idea, right? Well, not if you mean the Association Européene des Jeunes Entrepreneurs – AEJE (website here). The sole purpose of this organisation seems to be simply to attack all efforts to achieve a single seat for the European Parliament, and to […]
Over the years I’ve continually argued that the European Union needs to improve its representative democracy – it needs to develop federal institutions, and give citizens a genuine voice at elections. Yet while, in essence, I still believe in that, I nevertheless have to admit that representative democracy is struggling […]
It seems the European Parliament can do no right just at the moment. Following hot on the heels of Jack Straw calling for the European Parliament to be abolished, the Charlemagne column in The Economist has weighed into the debate with a piece entitled Elected, but how democratic? in which […]
It has not been a good few months for the European Parliament, and today probably tops all of the days for stories that show the EP in a bad light. As Jason O’Mahony points out, the EP lost the Toland Case in the ECJ yet still refuses to publish the […]
German Green MEP Reinhard Bütikofer outlines his concerns about Cathy Ashton this week in Strasbourg, including that she’s a ‘sentence generator’: So it gave me an idea. Now you can have a go as well, thanks to the automated Ashton Sentence Generator…
