Yesterday I was due to fly from Warsaw Chopin to London Luton with Wizzair at 1230. The plane eventually took off just before 2330. The original plane had technical problems and could not fly. Almost 11 hours of delay. So now, the day after, and with a clearer head after […]
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 […]
All was going so well. Eurostar 9156 departed on time from St Pancras at 1904, and arrived at around 2057 (local time, as scheduled) at Calais Frethun. Then nothing. No departure. Silence. Then the announcement that “for service reasons” we were to wait 10 minutes at Calais. At 2108 a […]
“Obama taught us one major thing in how to use the net for politics: done the right way, online activism can be a great way to engage and motivate people who are already – largely – on your side. The Obama team had a rather wide appeal; European efforts to […]
I’ve just arrived home, having taken Eurostar 9133, the 1256 departure from Brussels Midi to London St Pancras. The security paranoia on the route is now so absurd it’s worth a blog entry. The first check at Gare du Midi is a ticket check, where the QR code on a […]
There’s a depressing piece at Conservative Home by Tim Montgomery summarising results of a YouGov survey about the British population’s thoughts about their politicians and political system. One of the interesting findings is this: 38% agree that Britain would be governed better if our politicians got out of the way, […]
“I don’t know what annoys me more – that a high-level Labour politician can have such misguided ideas, or that the outcome of an event is reported in such a one-sided manner in the press. I am referring to The Guardian’s report on today’s IPPR event on the EU’s democratic […]
Apologies if this is stating the obvious to too many of my readers, but there is no truth about the European Union. The words sound simple enough. But what do I actually mean? People that are in favour of the European Union and their country’s continued membership of it have […]
When ACTA rapporteur Kader Arif threw in the towel a couple of weeks ago my initial thought was ‘OK, this is it, the European Parliament is about to capitulate‘. You can read more about Arif’s reasons here. I couldn’t have been more wrong. What has subsequently happened has been one […]
Daniel Korski has written a short piece at Spectator Coffee House entitled Where has the pro-EU camp gone? It’s a valid question to ask, if you view UK politics along the traditional lines of pro-EU versus anti-EU. The problem is that very frame only gets you so far. Korski rightly […]
Today marks 3 years of our little blogging project – BloggingPortal.eu It started as a conversation between Stefan, Andreas and I, and all the coding work was done by Stefan. The inspiration for it came from this blog post I wrote, and I still own the domain name. Beyond that […]
At one level it has been a privilege to attend the Danish Presidency Press Trip for the past four days. I’m the first blogger ever to have been allowed to attend, and hopefully not the last. But the whole experience leaves me feeling a little empty, although not quite for […]
