Odds and ends have been leaking out about Margaret Beckett preventing Geoff Hoon answering Parliamentary Questions on Europe on Tuesday this week – it even ended up at PMQs yesterday (see this amusing account from The Guardian). Hoon has also been in hot water for stating his hope that we […]
The US mid terms are around the corner, and the UK media has been working itself into a bit of a frenzy about all of it – well, it’s one of the few elections elsewhere conducted in English and there’s all that old rubbish about the special relationship, and Iraq […]
OK, I’ve had a joke here in the past about the frustrations of the damp in the kitchen in my flat – we were growing mushrooms there a few weeks ago, thanks to a dripping pipe from the washing machine that the previous tenant had not noticed. But weeks have […]
I’ve always admired Ken Livingstone. He’s clearly a very tricky and divisive character, but he does have a commitment and drive that so few politicians do. There’s a brilliant article in today’s Guardian about his take on climate change. This paragraph hits the nail on the head with regard to […]
I could not help laughing out loud when I discovered that today someone typed ‘fat people in bins‘ into Google and found my blog as the 5th ranked result! It’s actually a link to this post that I wrote when angry about being sat next to fat people in aircraft, […]
Euractiv reports on speeches made at a forum on demography, including one from Social Affairs Commissioner VladimÃÂr Ã…Â pidla, who claimed that demographic change was an opportunity just as much as it was a challenge. It would strike me that demographic change is a sign of success in a certain way […]
There have been plenty of reports about the damage that Climate Change will cause, but few have put a price on the damage in the way yesterday’s Stern Report did (article from The Guardian here). The Government’s response has been to propose to legislate for a 60% reduction in greenhouse […]
After many months of technical difficulties, today I finally managed to launch a new website for Peter Skinner MEP – www.peterskinnermep.eu. Running using the Joomla content management system, the site is a big step forward, both in terms of design and technology. Peter’s staff will assume complete responsibility for keeping […]
I’m half way through my first term of Swedish courses, and that means the first homework assignment to complete – 150 words about something you’ve done in your life. So I decided to write a little account of Midsommar in Sweden. Yet when you know very little grammar, and are […]
It’s damned hard to describe what qualities you need to be a leader – it depends on the person, it depends on the circumstances. Yet you always tend to know very well when people in an organisation you work in or with are not displaying the necessary leadership traits; I’ve […]
I’m leaving London for a few days and am off to Maastricht, the city most famous for the Treaty on European Union signed there in 1992. It started off what might be argued was the heyday-period of European integration – in the Post Cold War era anything seemed possible. The […]
An interesting debate has started at Bloggers4Labour about why individuals have chosen to join political parties, and the Labour Party in particular. The debate has kicked off in part as a result of some Rowntree Foundation / New Politics work on the issue – more here. So here’s my story […]
