A friend pointed me to the Working Document on a proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the citizens’ initiative from the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs. Rapporteurs for this are Zita Gurmai and Alain Lamassoure. This is not the first time I’ve […]
I spent an interesting couple of hours this morning at the launch event of the Brussels Blogger Study 2010, a report by public affairs company Waggener Edstrom about influence of bloggers in and on the EU. You can download the PDF of the study here (it’s not on their website, […]
I have respect for the UK blog Political Betting – I never bet on anything, but I like Mike Smithson’s rigourous analysis of odds. However when it comes to anything to do with the European Union reason and rigour seem to go out of the window. Take his recent rant […]
Via Twitter I came across this post in French by Michael Malherbe about a letter sent from Commissioner responsible for Communications, Viviane Reding, to Commission President Barroso. Euractiv managed to get hold of a copy of the letter that contains 14 points about how communications are to be improved. The […]
One of my favourite political books – mentioned on this blog before – is Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff. The idea behind the title is to show what happens when the wrong words are used. You read that title and of course you think of an elephant. […]
This weekend the World Cup starts to get exciting with the knock out round, and England are drawn against their old foes Germany at 1500 BST / 1600 CET on Sunday. When these countries have faced each other before the coverage in the UK press has been far from favourable, […]
I’ve seen some idiotic security controls in my time, but yesterday at Estació de França, Barcelona, beats all of them. The station, as the name implies, is the old terminus station for trains from the north of Catalonia towards France, and it’s also the station where night trains for France […]
There are two ways to use Twitter as a politician. The first (the right way) is to build a discussion, a conversation with people, to reply to normal Twitter users as well as other politicians and journalists. Politicians that understand this include @jeaninehennis @edballsmp and @corybooker. The second way (the […]
I’ve known for a while that I needed to move away from Brussels. I even tried to crowdsource some answers about where to move. But now my mind is made up – London it will be, from sometime later this year. I don’t know quite when yet, and I equally […]
“A little more than half a page of the Coalition Programme for Government deals with Britain’s relations with the European Union and, like much of the rest of the coalition deal, the EU policy combines soothing words and a mixture of Conservative and Lib Dem policy commitments. Brussels, for a […]
I was rather struck my Mark Thompson’s critique of the Labour Party’s current predicament – “I think Labour activists are in danger of underestimating just how damaged their own party brand already is” were the words he used. I really do not see it in those terms, and here are […]
EU Member States are obliged by the European Union to make available the data on recipients of Common Agricultural Policy money by 30th April each year, with data from the preceding year. Today is 1st May and Defra has put this message on its CAP payments website: Due to the […]
