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 […]
A friendly Irishman in Brussels has e-mailed me a link to the Spoofer’s Guide to How To Not Vote No to the Treaty of Lisbon. You can download the PDF here, and it’s linked from Ciaran Tolan’s website (a guy who looks a lot more serious than Jason O’Mahony who […]
I’ve just been past Schuman roundabout, still blocked off by masses of police, loads of barbed wire barriers, and hundreds of police. They have been looking after 300 disgruntled French fishermen protesting about the price of fuel for their boats. In typical Brussels style there were 4 water cannon trucks […]
My old MP Paul Flynn is in Brussels at the moment with the Public Administration Select Committee from the House of Commons and in his typically thoughtful and visceral way he has a go at the ‘dark arts of lobbying’ in Brussels. Look at Brussels from the outside and the […]
I was informed a couple of months ago about a system – QDOS – that tried to compare the online profile of Silvio Berlusconi and Walter Veltroni, and Berlusconi scored higher. While writing my previous post about that I started to wonder: what MEPs have the highest online profile? I […]
Just a quick post to highlight some interesting research conducted by Institut pour un Developpement Durable that looks at pouvoir d’achat (spending power). With rising food prices and oil prices there are complaints all over Europe that spending power is decreasing. Yet the research for Belgium, by Philippe Defeyt, shows […]
Via Gulf Stream Blues I’ve come across some of the utter rubbish Tony Blair has been saying about religion over the past few days. “Religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century.†Eugh! It makes me feel sick. […]
The Tories are getting themselves in a nice mess about the selection of the MEPs for the 2009 European elections – Conservative HQ is refusing to release the numbers of votes the sitting MEPs received from the party members, and Conservative Home is getting all worked up about it (background, […]
So the EU is going to get an equivalent of Facebook (Daily Telegraph, EUObserver). Well, no, it’s not that – it’s a social network of sorts, but it’s not a rival to Facebook (although you could use Facebook to do something similar). Myparl.eu promises to be a system to allow […]
