So much for the EU being corrupt. Ashley Mote, sometime UKIP MEP, but too nasty and dodgy even for them (hence his decision to sit in the EP with the Independence, Traditions and Sovereignty Group with people like the French Front National) has been jailed for 9 months for benefit […]
The European Parliament is trying to decide how numbers of MEPs will be allocated between different Member States in the future. News about it from EUObserver here. The Severin-Lamassoure idea is there should be 750 MEPs, with 6 per Member State, and a maximum of 96 for the largest country. […]
The Labour Movement for Europe has today uploaded a document [PDF here] that it claims is from the FCO that aims to rebut the myths about the EU Reform Treaty as stated by the eurosceptic think tank Open Europe. The document is very comprehensive, but is ludicrously defensive. Worst of […]
UK prison officers staged an unofficial strike yesterday. Today came Brown’s response: keeping public sector pay rises low is essential to keep the lid on inflation. OK, that applies to the entire public sector, but will that reassure the prison officers? That might have been an acceptable line while he […]
Will Hutton has penned what can only be described as an eloquent and rational rant in today’s Observer about the irrationalities of the the world’s financial markets – it’s short and well worth a read. The essence of his argument is that governments are so in awe of the importance […]
Politicians go out visiting people and opening things, so why not illustrate that on a map? Harriet Harman had a visits map on her site that I made using the excellent LumoNet Google Maps plugin for Typo3, but what about if someone is not using Typo3 and wants map integration […]
Thanks to the ECJBlog I’ve come across this transcript of an interview Jim Murphy, Minister for Europe, commenting on why the Reform Treaty is really very different from the European Constitution. When pressed on the issue – how can the government defend its position when Giscard, plenty of foreign ministers […]
I’ve known for a while that I’ll be working as a freelance website designer and EU politics trainer from the autumn of 2007. The main question outstanding was where I would be based. I’m now quite relieved to be able to confirm that Brussels will be my main place of […]
So the ‘debate‘ about whether Britain should hold a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty rumbles on. The Tories snipe from one side that this is indeed the same as the European Constitution, a document Blair was ready to put to a referendum. This is set against the backdrop of […]
It was suggested to me by a friend in Berlin that I should join a site called verwandt.de to put together an online family tree. Not much good as that’s all for people in Germany. But the English language equivalent – Geni.com – is now just taking off. The technology […]
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture paints a rather bleak picture of a generation that is economically troubled and emotionally taut – essentially the post-Baby Boom generation. The term Generation Y applies to people coming after them – statistically speaking people born after 1978. But that term has not […]
Sweden is a great place in so many ways – excellent social system, great on gender equality, generally happy population… Plenty of positives can be found in the Sweden & Swedish category. But this blog has today been linked by a couple of blogs (here and here) of Swedish right […]
