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 […]
Every Tuesday evening I get 2 hours of Swedish at Westminster University, and then a horrid blast of evangelical megaphone preaching while waiting on my bike at the traffic lights at Piccadilly Circus. Each and every Tuesday evening there is someone preaching there. This evening I was told that all […]
The fact that the UK is going to restrict rights of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to enter the UK has been dripping out through leaks and statements for a couple of months now. I first blogged about it on 31st August, with a follow-up on 26th September. But today John […]
I’ve not been especially kind to some of the EU’s ‘leaders‘ in this blog in recent times, and here’s another one for the series – European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, Charlie McCreevy. This is a quote from McCreevy, dated Sunday 5th June 2005 from the Irish newspaper […]
