A tweet by Emma Burnell pointed me towards this blog post by Tracy Hill about UKIP, and the threat they pose to Labour. You can read the whole blog post to look at the stuff about UKIP, but there is one paragraph I will highlight, for it shows the problems […]
Oh here we go again. It seems the question of how an independent Scotland could work in the EU will never go away. Rather than focusing on the EU’s Nobel Prize, BBC’s Hard Talk asked Barroso about Scotland and the EU in an interview today and, as before, Barroso reiterated […]
Forgive the even more rough and sketchy nature of this post than the normal you find on this blog, but this is about something that has been on my mind a lot recently, and I am struggling to adequately explain. I cannot back up what I am asserting here with […]
So the old master is back, working his rhetorical magic at a Business for New Europe / Chatham House event in London yesterday. The full text of his speech is here. At one level I welcome Blair’s intervention in the EU ‘debate’ in the UK – he speaks with a […]
If you’re astute you will realise that all the numbers in the heading of this blog entry are the same. They are different ways of saying the same thing, namely the amount of money the EU spends on what is called in the Financial Perspectives “Agricultural price support and rural […]
“Jobbik. Golden Dawn. Frank Stronach and the BZÖ. Perussuomalaiset. Partij voor de Vrijheid. Movimento 5 Stelle. UKIP. Piratpartiet. The party-political mainstream in Europe can no longer deny that the game is changing. Even if traditional parties do indeed have answers to the political and social challenges that all European countries […]
So Labour has another stab at getting together some sort of EU policy. Ed Miliband is interviewed in The Sunday Telegraph and the only thing that seems to emerge is that Labour needs a “hard-headed” approach to the European Union, courtesy of further spinning from Douglas Alexander on the Andrew […]
After lots of tweets and e-mails exchanged it seemed best to summarise everything in a blog post… I’m going to be in Brussels for 48 hours 25th-27th November, and as I haven’t been in the city for a while it seemed like a good idea to catch up with all […]
Two grandees of UK politics were at it again today. Peter Mandelson, while at least acknowledging an in-out referendum for the UK, was nevertheless pompous and deluded in the FT: “pro-Europeans […] should acknowledge that their case has largely been won by default and that it needs to be re-articulated […]
It was a normal enough evening. I was sat in a bar in Copenhagen, catching up with an old friend who was visiting, and I then checked Twitter. This from my good friend @Kosmopolit, and this from @Nosemonkey (tellingly including the words Ha ha ha!) alerted me that somehow I […]
The European Commission, and Commissioners themselves, have progressively taken to Twitter over the past couple of years as a way of communicating with (at?) EU citizens. So how are they doing? This blog entry gives a quick summary. My starting point is that a good Twitter account is an engaging […]
Back in 2004 the European Parliament made waves by preventing the Barroso I Commission from entering office, mostly due to the views of one nominee – Rocco Buttiglione. The problem was with Buttligione’s views on homosexuality and the role of the family. Fast forward 8 years and the European Parliament […]
