In January 2013 I stumbled upon Polish MEPs employing a lot of assistants. One employed 19 people, and two employed 17 each back then. The blog entry about that is here, and it was even covered by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Today the issue has been raised once more, as...
Henrik Enderlein and Jean Pisani-Ferry started to talk of an “economic Schengen” in the autumn of 2014, and Enderlein and Germany’s economy minister Gabriel were at it again today at a conference in the BMWi in Berlin. This is a really bad idea for four reasons, each of which I...
Relating to the Jack Straw lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian sugar firms (background here), a few quick remarks. First, we know from this, that: I got into see the relevant director general and his officials in Brussels … and we got the sugar regulations changed We also know the meeting...
I’ve never met European Commission for Trade Cecilia Malmström in person. But from tweets exchanged over the years with @MalmstromEU I have some picture of what Malmström must be like as a person. From serious discussions about the implementation of Schengen (her previous Commission post was Home Affairs), via deleted...
New year. Same old UK-EU comms. Two tweets from today: A new year brings new opportunities to debunk EU myths. Here is: things euroscpetics don't want you to know #1! pic.twitter.com/WtGnQx26pe — Richard Corbett (@RichardGCorbett) January 6, 2015 .@damiangreenmp argues that pro-Europeans must 'dispel the myth, fostered by the Better...
Back in 2013, José Manuel Barroso in his State of the European Union speech stated that the “EU needs to be big on big things and smaller on smaller things” (speech text here – phrase 3/4 of the way through). Since then this phrase has become some sort of mantra...
A tweet by Gergely Polner, sometime comms guy for the European Parliament in London, and now working in the private sector, tweeted this earlier today that caught my eye: "One has to acknowledge that EU has been a source of frustration even for those most favourably disposed towards it" http://t.co/7OwqPCbPdw...
Back in October 2011, when I still lived in London, I bought two pieces of software for my Macs in the Mac App Store – BBEdit, then priced at £34.99, and Pixelmator, then priced at £20.99*. Those apps have been upgrading happily enough through the App Store system until today....
This morning I am a speaker at European Disputes, part of the Internationales Literaturfestival. My panel, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Ulrike Guérot, György Dalos, Hubert Védrine and moderated by Wolfgang Herles will be live streamed below, 1015-1145. The full programme is here. Pose questions on Twitter using the tag #EUdisputes. Your browser...
On Friday 7th November I am a panellist at a conference entitled “European Disputes” that is part of the Internationales Literaturfestival in Berlin. I’m on a panel with both Dany Cohn-Bendit and Ulrike Guérot – that’s quite a privilege! Ulrike is one of Germany’s sharpest minds on EU matters, and...
I gave a presentation at Digitale Gesellschaft’s Netzpolitischer Abend on 7th October, entitled Online Campaigning in Brussels: the next five years
This tweet by @BenC42, at 2110 this evening, alerted me to a potentially interesting development in the negotiation of the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP): @europeangreens @SkaKeller @jonworth Commissioner-designate Malmstrom says she is ready to remove #ISDS from #TTIP http://t.co/gm95qbhhGU — BenC42 #RepealTheGRA (@BenC42) September 26, 2014 This pointed...