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:
Charles Grant’s poor pieces yesterday about national parliaments and EU decision making set me thinking: what think tanks are there that actually are trying to come up with solutions to make EU democracy work better? Yes, I respect ECFR and Bruegel, but EU democracy is not the main focus of […]
Charles Grant of the London-based think tank CER has written a piece entitled “Can national parliaments make the EU more legitimate?” Of course, having posed that question, Grant does not actually fully nail his colours to the mast as to whether he actually thinks national parliaments will help the EU […]
Over a coffee after State of the Net in Trieste, Luca Conti (@pandemia on Twitter) posed me a question. “What do you [meaning non-Italians] think of Beppe Grillo?” It’s also a question that my good friend Antonella Napolitano will be trying to answer at Personal Democracy Forum France later this […]
As Isabelle Philippe of Greenpeace France said to me, Greenpeace ships have some sort of mythical reputation about them. I suppose that’s why I took up the invite to go on board MY Arctic Sunrise in the first place. So what is life like on board Arctic Sunrise? You can […]
As Arctic Sunrise set off from its anchor off Lyme Regis last night, all the campaigners on board knew that in Brussels it would be an important night for future of Europe’s fisheries. The main protagonists were (from the Presidency) Irish Fisheries Minister Simon Coveney, European Commissioner Maria Damanaki, and […]
