EU Corruption blog has some interesting stats about the 2 referendums in Ireland on the Treaty of Nice in 2001 and 2002 – turnout was up from 34.79% in 2001 to 49.47% in 2002, and all of the increase was seen among Yes voters. The total number of votes cast […]
Via Public Affairs 2.0 I’ve come across a series of excellent videos called The CommonCraft Show. Using simple animations and paper cutouts they have a go at explaining all kinds of aspects of Web 2.0 – blogs, wikis, RSS, social media, Twitter (although it still doesn’t appeal!) Maybe these folks […]
The product of the finest consultancies, art schools and messy governmental compromises within national governments – each and every Presidency of the Council of the European Union feels it needs its own logo. So to mark the release of the French logo for 2008, here’s a retrospective of logos past… […]
Plaid Cymru MEP Jill Evans has once more raised the issue of Welsh and its status as a language at EU level, and this has generated some follow-up debate. So rather than look at the issue of Welsh in itself, how about some principles of how EU multi-lingualism could work? […]
The No side has – alarmingly – surged into the lead in the opinion polls prior to the referendum next week on the Treaty of Lisbon. From the article from the Irish Times about the poll, these are the crucial lines: The swing to the No camp has not been […]
So Giles Chichester, leader of the Tory MEPs in the European Parliament has (partially) fallen on his sword regarding expenses issues first raised by The Times. Chichester is resigning as leader of the Tory MEPs in the European Parliament. I would be astounded if he would choose to resign as […]
Jack and the folks at farmsubsidy.org have today released a new service – a map of Sweden that illustrates all of the CAP payments made across the country. More details of how they did it here. They are using information that is available in the public domain to plot the […]
A friendly Irishman in Brussels has e-mailed me a link to the Spoofer’s Guide to How To Not Vote No to the Treaty of Lisbon. You can download the PDF here, and it’s linked from Ciaran Tolan’s website (a guy who looks a lot more serious than Jason O’Mahony who […]
I’ve just been past Schuman roundabout, still blocked off by masses of police, loads of barbed wire barriers, and hundreds of police. They have been looking after 300 disgruntled French fishermen protesting about the price of fuel for their boats. In typical Brussels style there were 4 water cannon trucks […]
My old MP Paul Flynn is in Brussels at the moment with the Public Administration Select Committee from the House of Commons and in his typically thoughtful and visceral way he has a go at the ‘dark arts of lobbying’ in Brussels. Look at Brussels from the outside and the […]
I was informed a couple of months ago about a system – QDOS – that tried to compare the online profile of Silvio Berlusconi and Walter Veltroni, and Berlusconi scored higher. While writing my previous post about that I started to wonder: what MEPs have the highest online profile? I […]
Just a quick post to highlight some interesting research conducted by Institut pour un Developpement Durable that looks at pouvoir d’achat (spending power). With rising food prices and oil prices there are complaints all over Europe that spending power is decreasing. Yet the research for Belgium, by Philippe Defeyt, shows […]
