It’s never pleasant to be without electricity, and especially not if it is as a result of systemic failings or incompetence. This is what seems to have been the cause of yesterday’s blackout in parts of Germany and France – see EUObserver and the BBC for the details. While not […]
More than 400,000 people from the new member states have moved to live and work in the UK since 2004. As EU citizens they are eligible to vote in the local, regional and European elections. Yet with the London Mayor elections on the horizon, what efforts can be made to […]
Odds and ends have been leaking out about Margaret Beckett preventing Geoff Hoon answering Parliamentary Questions on Europe on Tuesday this week – it even ended up at PMQs yesterday (see this amusing account from The Guardian). Hoon has also been in hot water for stating his hope that we […]
Euractiv reports on speeches made at a forum on demography, including one from Social Affairs Commissioner VladimÃÂr Ã…Â pidla, who claimed that demographic change was an opportunity just as much as it was a challenge. It would strike me that demographic change is a sign of success in a certain way […]
I’m half way through my first term of Swedish courses, and that means the first homework assignment to complete – 150 words about something you’ve done in your life. So I decided to write a little account of Midsommar in Sweden. Yet when you know very little grammar, and are […]
It’s damned hard to describe what qualities you need to be a leader – it depends on the person, it depends on the circumstances. Yet you always tend to know very well when people in an organisation you work in or with are not displaying the necessary leadership traits; I’ve […]
I’m leaving London for a few days and am off to Maastricht, the city most famous for the Treaty on European Union signed there in 1992. It started off what might be argued was the heyday-period of European integration – in the Post Cold War era anything seemed possible. The […]
I’ve not been especially kind to some of the EU’s ‘leaders‘ in this blog in recent times, and here’s another one for the series – European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, Charlie McCreevy. This is a quote from McCreevy, dated Sunday 5th June 2005 from the Irish newspaper […]
With the EU still stuck in a deep period of reflection (hibernation?) I suppose it was no surprise that the celebrations to mark 50 years since the Treaty of Rome have been scaled back a lot. Plans for contests and parties have been ditched, as have ideas for symbolic tree […]
I’ve been sent the link to BeMEP.eu, and online game where you can play at being a Member of the European Parliament. It’s backed by – among others – the Konrad Adenauer foundation. But the problem is this: how does it work? The initial FAQ section was just too long […]
It all looked so pleasant for The Moderates in Sweden a few weeks ago – Reinfeldt had led the party to a historically high share of the vote, and he would be Prime Minister. Yet just over a week after the announcement of the new cabinet, 2 Ministers – Maria […]
The Party of European Socialists voted yesterday to suspend its Slovak member party SMER due to their decision to enter a coalition with right wing and populist parties, a matter that I have previously written about here. News on the story from EUObserver and the PES Press Release give more […]
