The screenshot above was taken at 1719 today, showing William Hague’s Twitter account, @WilliamJHague. It’s worth noting the three tweets present at the top, shown in more detail here: The first tweet is explicitly party political, while the second and third are retweets of governmental business. The Hague account states...
Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are announcing some preliminary Labour economic policies today, and one of the headlines is a reduction in VAT on petrol, from 20% back to the 17.5% level it was set at prior to January this year. The main argument is that as petrol prices rise...
David Miliband set out his concerns about the predicament of the European left in a speech at LSE this evening. The full text of his speech is available at Labourlist here, and Next Left has a little post from earlier here. As you would expect from the elder Miliband, the...
It was a Labour Party politics filled evening for me yesterday. First I heard Arnold Graf of the Industrial Areas Foundation from the United States talk at a Labour Values event about how his organisation had built networks of community organisations. Graf works with Maurice Glasman, one of the people...
It’s so easy for non-EU-phobic politicians in the UK to slip into it: a discourse that membership of the European Union is ‘in Britain’s national interest’. Wayne David’s recent piece for Labour List uses the term three times. Ben Fox, writing for the same site, says: But an In/Out referendum...
Here we go again. The next stage of the UK government’s effort to get more Brits into the EU institutions… is to try to skew the application system to assist Brits. Today’s FT has more on the story here. There’s more here about the government’s previous efforts. The essential gist...
The Fabians are running an event tomorrow entitled “Britain and Europe: In, out or somewhere in between?” I can’t attend the event as I’m in Austria at the moment, so I’ll raise a few points here instead. Frankly, the very title of the event makes me annoyed. Why can we...
A piece in the European Parliament magazine entitled “Plans for big shake-up in European elections branded ‘absurd’” caught my eye. It concerns ideas that have been rumbling around in Brussels about how to improve European elections, and the idea to create a transnational top-up list system comprising 25 MEPs of...
What should Labour’s EU policy be in opposition? What can at the same time be positive about the future, realistic, deliverable, and also decisively different from the coalition’s approach to the EU? Vital questions. The starting point seems to be a few high profile events to talk about this stuff – Policy...
It has not been an easy week for the government (and indeed UK politics as a whole) when it comes to sovereignty, rights and responsibilities. A non-binding motion in the House of Commons yesterday was passed 234-22 in favour of maintaining a blanket ban on prisoners voting, putting the UK...
A friend has mailed me a link to the ‘See Me, Save Me’ campaign, run by the mother of a cyclist killed by a lorry turning. That campaign wants to pass a written declaration in the European Parliament, making it the position of the European Parliament that sensors and cameras...
“You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Bob Dylan. Never could words be more apt to describe my return to National School of Government for the last two days to run a training course for twenty civil servants about negotiations in Brussels and UK-EU...