Brexit negotiations are heading towards their hardest phase. With less than 6 months to go, with no solution to the Irish Border problem in sight, and with Theresa May in a precarious position within her own party, the chances of actually getting a Withdrawal Agreement that is acceptable to both […]
Seeing this tweet heartened me a lot this morning: Tired, but excited on the way to London. WE STILL LOVE YOU 💖#PeoplesVoteMarch pic.twitter.com/JFJu7GlSSg — Terry Reintke (@TerryReintke) October 20, 2018 That’s the spirit! And Terry (on the left) is a German Green MEP, and Sibylle (on the right) is one […]
So there has been no progress on Brexit at the European Council that started last night and is carrying on today, and there will be no extra summit about Brexit mid-November either until Michel Barnier reports “decisive progress” in talks. I’d hoped it would not be so, and that a […]
A week from now leaders of the European Union’s 27+1 Member States will have sore heads after a long night. Friday 19th October will be the second day of the European Council at which the fate of the Brexit negotiations is to be decided. However hard it is, decide something […]
After having asked myself what libraries are for in my previous post, now the political bit – what can the EU do for libraries? Or what should it do? Ilona Kish from the Public Libraries 2020 programme in Brussels ran a workshop about funding opportunities for libraries here at Next […]
Straightforward honesty, clear ethics, transparency of motives and behaviour, and an ability to acknowledge when one is wrong, are personal values I personally hold dear, and they are – I would argue – values that the general public would like to also see from their politicians. The problem is, as […]
Today has been my first day at Next Library, a two day conference about libraries and their future that’s taking place at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg in Berlin. While I am super happy to be able to go to something that’s barely five minutes on foot from where I live, […]
It’s early September 2018. Officially Brexit – 29 March 2019 – is now just 199 days away. Lest we forget, the Withdrawal Agreement that is due to be agreed is supposed to deal with three issues – citizens rights, budgetary contributions, and the Irish border. There is something like an […]
Over the past week a fair few people have tweeted that it’s time for those on both sides of the Brexit debate to do more to respect the other side. Most of these comments come from the make-the-best-of-Brexit sort of people, many of them formerly soft Remain people who think […]
Prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections I examined all the runners and riders for President of the European Commission and other EU top jobs (2014 posts on President of the Commission: EPP, PES, Others | President of the European Council | High Rep for EU Foreign Policy). Now, with […]
So 84% of Europeans want to stop changing the clocks in spring and autumn. And 3.79% of the German population participated in a European Commission consultation. A summary of the details can be found here. So stop changing the clocks then! Hang on, not so fast. The question then is […]
It’s pretty seldom I agree with Larry Elliott in The Guardian, but the headline of his recent piece – “Britons seem relatively relaxed in the face of Brexit apocalypse” – struck me as about right. Because there is not going to be a Brexit apocalypse. Or at least not in […]
