So much for the EU being corrupt. Ashley Mote, sometime UKIP MEP, but too nasty and dodgy even for them (hence his decision to sit in the EP with the Independence, Traditions and Sovereignty Group with people like the French Front National) has been jailed for 9 months for benefit […]
The European Parliament is trying to decide how numbers of MEPs will be allocated between different Member States in the future. News about it from EUObserver here. The Severin-Lamassoure idea is there should be 750 MEPs, with 6 per Member State, and a maximum of 96 for the largest country. […]
The Labour Movement for Europe has today uploaded a document [PDF here] that it claims is from the FCO that aims to rebut the myths about the EU Reform Treaty as stated by the eurosceptic think tank Open Europe. The document is very comprehensive, but is ludicrously defensive. Worst of […]
Thanks to the ECJBlog I’ve come across this transcript of an interview Jim Murphy, Minister for Europe, commenting on why the Reform Treaty is really very different from the European Constitution. When pressed on the issue – how can the government defend its position when Giscard, plenty of foreign ministers […]
Sweden is a great place in so many ways – excellent social system, great on gender equality, generally happy population… Plenty of positives can be found in the Sweden & Swedish category. But this blog has today been linked by a couple of blogs (here and here) of Swedish right […]
I’ve been living a sheltered and abnormal life in London. In my everyday work almost all my colleagues are thoughtful and reflective, and the working environment generally supportive. I spend plenty of my free time with people for whom gender and equality issues are extremely important, and I’ve spent more […]
I promise I’ll get back to writing about politics sometime soon, but for the moment the only thing really worth writing about is Berlin. After posting a whole slew of pictures from this morning, I have spent a day doing website work sat on Bernd’s balcony in a very secluded […]
0609 on a Monday. What a thought. The forecast for the day was good; I knew that. The sun was just on the horizon behind the Fernsehturm as my train meandered through Gesundbrunnen and down into the underground platforms of Hauptbahnhof, stark fluorescent lighting and medical cleanliness in fierce juxtaposition […]
I’m heading towards Berlin this afternoon – on the X2000 to Malmö and then on the night train from there to Berlin, that goes on the Trelleborg-Sassnitz ferry. Have never been on a train on a ferry… The crossing is less than 4 hours – much better than the 26 […]
There’s a logo that seems to be starting to appear everywhere… It’s on the dustbin lorries in Westminster, on the road sweepers’ carts in Lambeth, and, so it seems, it’s all over the world doing all kinds of environmental and transport work – trains, buses, water, environmental services. It’s the […]
Gordon Brown’s cabinet is taking shape and overall it looks fine – I’m especially happy to see David Miliband as Foreign Secretary. But there are 2 matters of concern. Firstly the Minister of State for Europe (most recently Geoff Hoon under Blair) had been entitled to attend cabinet, and that […]
There’s a nasty conference centre that belongs to the European Commission in Brussels called the Albert Borschette building. It’s close to Place Jourdan and is a 1970s construction. But the story behind its name is an intriguing one. Albert Borschette was a Luxembourg diplomat who rose to the position of […]
