Jeremy has pointed me towards an appeal that has just been launched, calling for a UN Parliamentary Assembly. The campaign has plenty of high-level backers but any individual is also welcome to sign. If you care about reform of the UN and global governance it’s well worth having a look. […]
A great British institution – the beach hut. At Southwold in Suffolk there are plenty of them, in many bright colours. It was a pleasure to spend a weekend pottering around the Suffolk countryside, a welcome break from London.
As has been widely reported, Turkey has a bit of a problem on its hands with the selection of its new President. Opposition CHP members of Parliament boycotted the vote, so the election of the ruling AK Party’s candidate – Abdullah Gul – has been called into question. Gul was […]
I thought it was about time to do something about the energy consumption from lighting in the flat I live in with Helena, so hence I have invested in 20 7W compact energy-efficient bulbs, bought online from LightingWorld. These are really wee bulbs – they are small enough to fit […]
The UK Green MEPs in the European Parliament have commissioned a report showing how much CO2 the monthly travelling circus to Strasbourg produces – 20000 tonnes to be precise, as much as flying 13000 people across the Atlantic and back. See The Independent, and Jonathan Newton’s blog. I’m actually quite […]
First there was the Social Europe journal, and now there’s the Social Europe blog to go with it. The idea is to be able to publish articles about centre left EU politics that are intellectual but not as long or developed as those that go into the journal. I’ve been […]
Just a short note to highlight this post made a couple of days ago by Labour MEP Richard Corbett. Richard is the best of the UK Labour MEPs in my opinion, he was once President of JEF, is also giving LME a kick-start, and is a very pleasant chap. But […]
I must look like just the sort of person who would give money to charity – people accost me in the street all the time. I do give a lot of money to charitable causes, but, so the argument goes, giving to a half-dozen organisations already does not preclude giving […]
The focus of most of Europe’s press this week has rightly been on the French elections. I’ve had an eye on that too, but there’s nothing I can write about it that has not been adequately covered elsewhere. I would instead like to reflect a little on the other major […]
I received an e-mail yesterday from a Slovene friend based in Brussels, wondering why he had suddenly started to receive campaign updates from Labour Deputy Leadership candidate Jon Cruddas. The e-mail address now on Cruddas’s list was subscribed to no other centre-left UK politics list other than the Compass Newsletter. […]
I’ve always had a degree of respect for Louis Michel, sometime foreign minister during Belgium’s 2001 EU Presidency. He seems a jovial and reasonably intelligent chap and, since 2004 as European Commissioner responsible for the development portfolio, has done a decent job – better than his predecessor Poul Nielson at […]
EU justice ministers have agreed that holocaust denial should be a criminal offence throughout all 27 Member States, punishable with a sentence of between 1 and 3 years, with some caveats (summary here). It’s worth underlining that this will almost certainly have been agreed under Pillar III – Police & […]
