In London yesterday morning an eerie calm fell over Whitehall. No traffic, not even pedestrians. George Bush, leader of the free world, was in town. So, ordinary people, get out of the way. Returning to Brussels yesterday evening I find razor wire barricades already set up at Rue Joseph II […]
OK, so the Treaty of Lisbon is not going to be ratified this year, and perhaps not at all. So what happens to all the top positions in the EU that need to be decided upon? First and foremost there will be no permanent President of the European Council – […]
I hope I’m premature writing this – final results in the Irish referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon have not yet been released but all the tallies so far point towards a No vote. That’s also the impression conveyed to me via people in Dublin. No vote has been confirmed […]
EU Referendum has had a whinge at some lines in a European Parliament resolution by Estonian Socialist MEP Marianne Mikko that mentions blogs. Bruno Waterfield has also jumped on the bandwagon. Get a grip folks. What’s the first thing to do when someone in the EP sounds off? Look at […]
Two top secret papers about al-Qaeda and on the state of Iraq’s security forces were left on a London Waterloo to Surrey train yesterday, found by another passenger, and passed to the BBC (BBC News Story). Serious enough in itself. Only today in Westminster MPs were voting on whether to […]
So you think federalism is a good principle on which to base the European Union? Or you have some wider, more fluffy notion of European unity? What do you do? My route, and I’m happy to describe myself as a federalist, was to join the Young European Federalists and work […]
A post by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber prompted me to look at the issue being banded about by the No camp in the Irish referendum campaign that ratifying the Treaty would mean Ireland’s low corporation taxation regime could be challenged. The legal technicalities of this are explained by Ralf […]
The No to the Treaty of Lisbon camp in Ireland have a new weapon – Dustin the Turkey, dumped out of the Eurovision Song Contest at the semi-final stage. The slogan goes ‘They didn’t vote for us. Get them back. Vote No to Lisbon’ – BBC News has an article […]
EU Corruption blog has some interesting stats about the 2 referendums in Ireland on the Treaty of Nice in 2001 and 2002 – turnout was up from 34.79% in 2001 to 49.47% in 2002, and all of the increase was seen among Yes voters. The total number of votes cast […]
A Tory Councillor in Southport has defected to Labour (more from LabourHome), apparently citing David Cameron’s opposition to 42 day detention of terror suspects without trial. Strikes me that there must be more to it than that – would a national issue like that prompt someone to defect? It also […]
Via Public Affairs 2.0 I’ve come across a series of excellent videos called The CommonCraft Show. Using simple animations and paper cutouts they have a go at explaining all kinds of aspects of Web 2.0 – blogs, wikis, RSS, social media, Twitter (although it still doesn’t appeal!) Maybe these folks […]
The product of the finest consultancies, art schools and messy governmental compromises within national governments – each and every Presidency of the Council of the European Union feels it needs its own logo. So to mark the release of the French logo for 2008, here’s a retrospective of logos past… […]
