Everyone’s favourite Europhile with a British passport Anthony Zacharzewski (@anthonyzach) is in Brussels on 14th October. So we will run an #EUtweetup that evening, to show him that Brussels is not all just grey corridors and committee meetings. Anthony also runs The Democratic Society in the UK, so people interested in...
So the UK has lodged a legal challenge with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on new EU rules on pay in the banking sector, specifically about bankers’ bonuses (framed as “Osborne to take EU to court” (see FT for example)). The Gov.uk news story about it is here. There...
I’m very happy to be sat today at the launch event of MyVote2014, a new voting tool for the European Parliament elections 2014. I’ve been working with Michiel, Joan and Doru at VoteWatch Europe, the folks behind the site, to help them with some of the social media promotion of...
In response to Barroso’s State of the Union address today, leader of the ALDE Group in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt resorted to his tired old line. The pro-European forces should unite against Euroscepticism, he said, and this will define 2014 European Parliament election campaign. Verhofstadt has been saying this...
As discussion carries on about whether Neelie Kroes is going to actually manage to massively cut roaming fees for data across the EU, or not, thanks to a discussion with @JoeThorpe1963 on Twitter, here is an additional suggestion for Kroes and the Commission. Both Joe and I are regular travellers...
Summer is over. Everyone is back to work tweeting about politics. So that means it’s time to get the political twitter nerds together to meet in real life. For those of you that have not been to one of these before (we’ve run at least three before), the idea is...
So the Spain-Gibraltar border dispute rumbles on. Queues at the land border to enter Gibraltar persist, and suggestions abound that Spain may introduce a charge to cross from Gibraltar into Spain. Meanwhile Tory MEP for the South West & Gibraltar, Ashley Fox, has called on the European Commission to take...
My challenge this morning was to build a systematic, and free, way to keep an eye on breaking news about UK-EU relations. Of course I have had ad hoc ways of doing this until now, but for a project I am working on I needed to make it more systematic. The...
This is the current front page of Spiegel’s website: The top five stories are about GCHQ’s Tempora surveillance programme. Germany’s Justice Minster Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has gone on the record to speak of a “Hollywood-style nightmare”. It’s top story on the FAZ, and number 3 at Sueddeutsche. The Guardian has all...
Croatia is joining the EU on 1st July, and everyone’s favourite Croat EU politics Twitter nerd, Dario Čepo, is in Brussels just before the accession. There’s even the be CROATive expo about Croatia next to the EP at the same time. So all EU bloggers / Twitter nerds are most...
Yesterday is was David Cameron at the G8 summit, claiming that a US-EU trade deal (known as TTIP) could create 2 million jobs. The European Commission meanwhile has been using the figure of €545 per person benefit of a deal (quoted by TUC here, and mentioned by @SkaKeller at an...
State of the Net conference, Trieste, Italy Keynote: Interview: