President of the EPP Party Wilfried Martens has just upped the pressure on David Cameron by asking for a clear decision by April from the Tory leader as to whether the UK Conservatives will sit in the EPP-ED group in the European Parliament after the elections in June. This is […]
The end of a clear January day in Roma. Time for a run before the sun set over the pines lining the hills along the Tiber north of the city, a perfect end to a long day in the office. The cycle path along the Tiber is a perfect place […]
There are hundreds of blogs about the European Union and EU politics. So how do you make a start reading them? It’s no easy task. But today things just became a whole lot easier with the launch of BloggingPortal.eu – the new and easy way to follow blogs about the […]
My favourite member of the European Commission has an interesting past… Hat tip: EUX.tv / Schuman Square Silvio Berlusconi instead seems to think it’s OK – in public – to look like he’s more than attracted to a traffic warden. Eeeuuuuggghhh. Please, please get rid of that man. Hat tip: […]
I happened to catch a few moments of PMQs today, and Alan Beith asked a question about how EU funds were being denied to the North East, while Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were still eligible for the same funds, essentially unused cash from the European Commission £178bn economic stimulus […]
I sat listening to Obama’s inauguration speech thinking: oh for a European politician capable of something similar! Of course the systems and characters are very different… But Britain, one way or another, is going to get a new Prime Minister sometime in the not too distant future. So I took […]
As reported by the Irish Times: […] all eyes were on the new president of the European Council, Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek. Outlining his priorities for the next six months, he surprised MEPs by announcing that if a referendum were held on the Lisbon Treaty in the Czech Republic, […]
The dreadful errors made by the Czech Presidency of the European Union go on and on… They don’t know who’s who in the Kremlin, they think Israel is defensive, and now they’ve caused all kinds of fuss by hanging art in the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels that depicts national […]
A post at Dizzy Thinks caught my eye. Gordon Prentice MP, never one to beat about the bush – has said stated this in a Commons motion: That this House believes that individuals who are given peerages to enable them to serve as Ministers in the House of Lords should […]
What an idea! That doing 2 Google searches produces as much CO2 as boiling water for a cup of tea. This is the first line of the Sunday Times article in which the claim appeared: Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of […]
Adriaan Schout and Jeroen van Dijken wrote a column last week in Dutch daily de Volkskrant entitled EU kan goed zonder Europees Parlement – essentially that the EU could do OK without the European Parliament. I picked up on the story via euro|topics. The whole line of the column, as […]
So here we go again. The EU has a multitude of problems on its hands: Russia turning off the gas, the Gaza conflict brewing, and no-one really knowing what to do about the economic downturn, least of all the Commission. The Czech Presidency has already made a few gaffes, and […]
