In a previous post I analysed the likely candidates from the centre left PES for Commission President. Here I examine who the centre right EPP might put forward. It is worth bearing in mind that the nomination process depends on the outcome of the European Parliament elections, according to Article...
[Please note: this is not a piece about referendums in general, and nor does it call into question my overall position as a referendum-sceptic. It relates to a very specific Danish case.] The Danish Ministry of Justice, in the final page of this note (in Danish, PDF), has once more thrust...
So someone had the temerity to criticise the über-Eurocrat Barroso on the blog of the Eurocrat school! And then the blog post was removed, without explanation, as pointed out by @quarsan on Twitter, and argued on Facebook here. Anyway, thanks to the joys of Google Cache, here is a PDF...
For me it was a journey by rail like any other: a Paris to Milan TGV between two work assignments. Until, between St Jean de Maurienne and Modane, stations near the border on the French side, four policemen passed through the train asking all passengers for passports. “Why,” I asked...
Every five years Brussels has a bout of political intrigue. It is the time when a new European Parliament is elected, and connected to that, a new team of European Commissioners chosen. The European Parliament elections are due in May 2014, and with the Commission due to be chosen in...
I was at an event in Brussels this week where there was much discussion about Labour trying to find 5 points it could put on a pledge card during the 2014 European Parliament election campaign. So, looking at what top politicians in the Labour Party have been saying about the...
It has taken a couple of months to get everything in order, but I am now very happy to be able to announce my most unlikely, and most exciting, project to date as a blogger about EU affairs – I am going on board the Greenpeace boat Arctic Sunrise, as...
“Europeans show strong sense of solidarity” – it seemed a counter-intuitive headline (in a tweet from @svaroschi) in these times of social strife. The story was Deutsche Welle’s coverage of some new research conducted by the Open Society Foundations. The summary of the research is here (although that makes no specific...
So the European Commission and 7 Member States finance and commission a European Report on Development. There have been three of them so far (details here), and the latest one – entitled Post-2015: Global Action for an Inclusive and Sustainable Future will be released on Tuesday next week. There’s apparently...
On 4th March, George Osborne suffered a bruising defeat in negotiations in the Council of the EU about bankers’ bonuses. 26 EU Member States wanted limits on bonuses, Britain did not, and as the dossier was voted under Qualified Majority Voting (QMV), Britain was marginalised, and lost. OK, the financial sector...
It’s not quite my normal topic – development aid – but here I am in Paris, sat blogging about the OECD’s Global Forum on Development. Why? Well, in short because I was asked. Linda Warnier who works on online communications for OECD is someone I’ve worked with in the past...
I’m no fan of George Bush. But he did do one good thing – he lengthened Daylight Savings Time in the USA by 4 weeks, and made Daylight Saving more symmetrical – now clocks change back in the USA the first Sunday of November (rather than last Sunday of October),...