“I don’t want anything to do with the European Movement. They are federalists!” Those were the words a British friend of a friend in Brussels said to me this week as we were discussing what sort of organisations would be needed in the UK to make sure any eventual in-out...
[I wrote this piece, unsolicited, for Comment is Free of The Guardian today. They did not want it, so I publish it here instead] Last week on these pages the CBI’s John Cridland set out why leaving the EU would be bad for British business. Business grandees such as Richard...
So Tory Andrew Feldman may or may not have said that some of the party’s members are “swivel-eyed loons”. I am not especially bothered whether he said it or not, because as far as I am concerned it is right. And it is not only in the Tory party that...
In Greek mythology the Lernaean Hydra is a monster with many heads, and every time one head is removed two more grow in its place. So too, it seems, is the case for the UK Independence Party just now. Yesterday there was a new (and, for UKIP, rather predictable) media...
Dear Gordon, I am writing to you to ask some questions about the European Parliament selection process conducted in your region. I have been accused by Jonathan Ashworth MP of making ‘cheap accusations‘ as a result of my blog entry about the selection of Nicki Brooks so I am writing...
It has been an interesting week. My posts about Labour’s MEP selections, and the panel member in the East Midlands, Nicki Brooks, who seems to have selected herself, have prompted all sorts of debate, comments, and e-mails sent to me. My blog even already ranks 6th in Google UK if...
09:05 on 9th April, this comment appeared in response to my blog post about Labour MEP selections, by a chap called Joseph who also did not leave a valid e-mail address and is hence untraceable: Hi Jon, Interesting selections from Labour again ….. In the East Midlands Nikki Brookes was...
“Ed Miliband says the right things when it comes to engagement of Labour party members in selection processes. ‘You’ve got to leave it to party members to make their decisions. And that’s the way it should be’ he said in a recent interview with Mark Ferguson of LabourList. Why then,...
So, as reported on LabourList earlier, Labour’s MEP lists are now out, and I am angry and disappointed by the outcome. The full list of names, together with one line bios, website links, and Twitter usernames can be found at the end of this post, and there is a Twitter...
Realising his speech in January did not go down too well in EU capitals, David Cameron is this week embarking on a charm offensive across Europe. He’s visiting Madrid, Paris and Berlin, among others, basically trying to sell to others his call for repatriation of powers, oops, no, sorry, that...
“What I’ve never really understood,” a philosophy lecturer at Merton College who hadn’t taught me asked me at a leaving reception upon graduating in 2001, “was why you actually wanted to study PPE?” My answer then, and as true for me now as then, was short and simple: “Because I...
I suppose I should have had my suspicious that all would not be right with the selection process for Labour’s new MEP candidates when the initial information about the process was so thin. So it’s with considerable sadness and annoyance that it now turns out that one of the very...