So the news from the COP15 talks this morning is rather inevitable. The USA and a few other countries have cobbled together some sort of deal, and developing countries (and even – weedily – the European Union) are complaining it’s deeply inadequate. There will be some effort to save face, […]
I’m writing this blog entry at Frankfurt Airport. My flight departs for Lilongwe, Malawi (via Addis Ababa) shortly. I’m teaching in Lilongwe this week, then have a long weekend on the shores of Lake Malawi. I’m back in Europe (and hence back with proper net access) on 16th December. Photos […]
Ho, ho, here we go again. A question posed in the House of Commons by Philip Davies (Con) as cited by the Open Europe blog: Given that the accounts of the EU have not been signed off by the auditors for 15 years running, why do the Government keep giving […]
The French President can behave like a petulant teenager, yet the British press (and the British Bankers’ Association) seem to not understand that the best thing to do with a petulant teenager is to ignore it. The Times led today with the headline “Banks blast ‘hostile’ Sarkozy over City rule […]
The Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets has caused a load of hand-wringing. Why? Of course it’s absolutely wrong to deny freedom of religious expression, and the outcome of the vote is wrong. I’m no fan of any religion but here the Voltaire quote seems apt: “I do not […]
Back in the autumn of 2004 I was working in London. It was a year or so before I even started this blog and I was working as a civil servant on EU energy policy. News reached us that a controversial Italian nominee to the European Commission, Rocco Buttiglione, had […]
I’ve come across this little summary from PressEurop of an article from the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza which looks at comments within the EPP saying that anyone who formerly co-operated with “repressive regimes and undemocratic organizations” be denied the post of Commissioner. This is essentially a way of saying that […]
It took them 3 months to get a website together, and not before I had hit them with a bit of cyber squatting. Now the ECR Group in the EP is at it again with its catastrophic IT – this time applying it to Twitter. 3 weeks ago I noticed […]
In June and July 2007 parts of the UK were hit be severe floods. The EU has a Solidarity Fund to help its Member States deal with natural disasters, yet in the months after the floods wrangling continued about whether the UK would get any money from the fund, and […]
I’m on my way back to Brussels from Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona. I enjoyed participating in the conference, and was also very grateful to have been able to moderate one of the sessions there. Some of the everyday practical conclusions of PdF Europe will become clearer in due […]
I try to see the positives where I can, but I am really struggling this evening. Who actually wanted Barroso, Van Rompuy and Ashton to be running the European Union? It all strikes me as the lowest common denominator of the worst sort. As @kosmopolit pointed out on Twitter, the […]
Rumours are reaching me via Twitter that Baroness Ashton, UK Labour politician and outgoing Commissioner for Trade is the individual the socialists are now backing to be the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy. I must say I am astounded. Let me at least set the record straight about what […]
