Ever seen this notice on the London Underground? Bet you have. You’re sure? Perhaps it’s time for a bit of a guerrilla feminist campaign in the public space in the UK. All we would need would be 2 triangles of blue sticky back plastic, and 2 white triangles. (Inspired by...
UK Politics
I loose track who I’ve told and who has just heard earlier stages of the plan… so here’s an explanation about my imminent move to London. Essentially for the last 6 months I have been wondering whether to move. After 3 years based predominantly in Brussels I felt it was...
“If in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since” was a classic line from an interview in The Guardian...
This weekend the World Cup starts to get exciting with the knock out round, and England are drawn against their old foes Germany at 1500 BST / 1600 CET on Sunday. When these countries have faced each other before the coverage in the UK press has been far from favourable,...
There are two ways to use Twitter as a politician. The first (the right way) is to build a discussion, a conversation with people, to reply to normal Twitter users as well as other politicians and journalists. Politicians that understand this include @jeaninehennis @edballsmp and @corybooker. The second way (the...
I’ve known for a while that I needed to move away from Brussels. I even tried to crowdsource some answers about where to move. But now my mind is made up – London it will be, from sometime later this year. I don’t know quite when yet, and I equally...
No-one visiting a politician’s website realistically expects the site to be entirely written by the actual individual. But how should a site be written and designed on a candidate’s behalf? Importantly, what person should be used in the text?
Scandal! The new Stratford International station might well not have any international trains stopping there. Among others the Mayor of Newham and investors building a shopping centre at Stratford are up in arms, as reported by the Evening Standard. Actually it’s no scandal. It’s just sensible. And I say this...
This blog has been a little quiet recently, but it’s not because I’ve stopped writing. Post-election UK politics is more interesting than at any point for the last few years and I’ve been entering the debates by writing elsewhere – in the main because this blog has a very EU-focused...
“Online campaigning may be crucial to the winner’s success, as suggested by Harriet Harman’s 2007 deputy leadership win, a disparate electorate and the myriad opportunities now afforded by social media Just last week I wrote a piece for Progress entitled ‘Was 2010 the internet election?’ – essentially looking at the...
At attempt to return to the past always gets the Brits drooling. Let’s get back to times when Britain ruled the waves! This was essentially the sentiment behind Boris Johnson’s promise to get a new Routemaster bus onto London’s roads by 2011 2012, replacing the bendy buses he made such...
“A little more than half a page of the Coalition Programme for Government deals with Britain’s relations with the European Union and, like much of the rest of the coalition deal, the EU policy combines soothing words and a mixture of Conservative and Lib Dem policy commitments. Brussels, for a...