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 […]
Via Gulf Stream Blues I’ve come across some of the utter rubbish Tony Blair has been saying about religion over the past few days. “Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century.†Eugh! It makes me feel sick. […]
The Tories are getting themselves in a nice mess about the selection of the MEPs for the 2009 European elections – Conservative HQ is refusing to release the numbers of votes the sitting MEPs received from the party members, and Conservative Home is getting all worked up about it (background, […]
So the EU is going to get an equivalent of Facebook (Daily Telegraph, EUObserver). Well, no, it’s not that – it’s a social network of sorts, but it’s not a rival to Facebook (although you could use Facebook to do something similar). Myparl.eu promises to be a system to allow […]
I have no idea whether it’s viable, or whether he would consider it, but I think I have – from a personal point of view – come up with a candidate I would actually like to see as President of the European Commission: Pascal Lamy. He has a background as […]
When something is a fresh project you’re always willing to try the latest, brightest, most shiny new software for it. Problem is that this blog is no longer that! With 780 posts in 3 years, 110000 individual visitors in the last 12 months, 3Gb monthly data transfer, and a number […]
Problems at Sizewell B nuclear power plant were partly to blame for blackouts in the UK yesterday. Costs of nuclear decommissioning are due to soar above the £73bn already calculated, announced on Tuesday this week. So Gordon Brown states yesterday how keen he is for the UK to build new […]
OK, there are 142.2 million people in Russia, Europe’s largest country voting in Eurovision. San Marino, the smallest, has a mere 20000. But when it comes to the votes allocated in Eurovision each county’s votes count equally. If you think the EU’s Qualified Majority Voting system for legislation is bad, […]
MEPs are having a whinge that a French rail strike is going to make it hard for them to get from Strasbourg when this week’s European Parliament plenary session ends. Struan Stevenson, a UK Tory, has complained that France doesn’t exactly make it easy for European Parliamentarians to get to […]
‘Well, he would say that wouldn’t he’ will surely be the reaction (if anyone does bother reacting) to Nick Clegg’s article in today’s Independent about the state of British democracy. But just read it. British politics is archaic, out of touch, and badly in need of reform (as I’ve previously […]
“We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.” So said Aneurin Bevan. Presumably that quote is behind Labour’s current by-election campaign in Crewe & Nantwich. In response to the death of a tough and principled left winger, the party’s final […]
Welt am Sonntag reported yesterday that David Miliband might be a candidate for the EU Foreign Minister High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the foreign affairs position created by the Treaty of Lisbon. A FCO spokesperson has made a very bland statement that Miliband is […]
