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… […]
Plaid Cymru MEP Jill Evans has once more raised the issue of Welsh and its status as a language at EU level, and this has generated some follow-up debate. So rather than look at the issue of Welsh in itself, how about some principles of how EU multi-lingualism could work? […]
The No side has – alarmingly – surged into the lead in the opinion polls prior to the referendum next week on the Treaty of Lisbon. From the article from the Irish Times about the poll, these are the crucial lines: The swing to the No camp has not been […]
So Giles Chichester, leader of the Tory MEPs in the European Parliament has (partially) fallen on his sword regarding expenses issues first raised by The Times. Chichester is resigning as leader of the Tory MEPs in the European Parliament. I would be astounded if he would choose to resign as […]
Jack and the folks at farmsubsidy.org have today released a new service – a map of Sweden that illustrates all of the CAP payments made across the country. More details of how they did it here. They are using information that is available in the public domain to plot the […]
