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 […]
BusinessWeek has an interesting (although somewhat short) overview of the political impact of blogging in this week’s edition – read it online here. Starting with a critique of webcameron, David Cameron’s video podcast / blog site, it goes on to chart the importance of political blogging in a number of […]
Sometimes you come across things in London that are utterly ludicrous. Today I noticed the sign pictured – that some person Walworth has installed a CCTV system to protect their plants on the street from theft. Now, either the plants have all already been stolen, or else the person is […]
I’m spending 36 hours in Brighton at a conference, hence why no profound analysis of EU politics has been posted here today! 🙂 In short, it’s annoying to be away from home, from Helena, and staying in a grim hotel that smells of cigarettes and cooked breakfasts. But on the […]
Thanks to a new plugin – Slimstat – I’ve installed for my blog, I now have a whole wealth of data on how visitors are managing to find my blog. Some of the findings are really bizarre, but quite cool in an odd way. If you search for ‘life jackets […]
With the EU still stuck in a deep period of reflection (hibernation?) I suppose it was no surprise that the celebrations to mark 50 years since the Treaty of Rome have been scaled back a lot. Plans for contests and parties have been ditched, as have ideas for symbolic tree […]
I’ve been sent the link to BeMEP.eu, and online game where you can play at being a Member of the European Parliament. It’s backed by – among others – the Konrad Adenauer foundation. But the problem is this: how does it work? The initial FAQ section was just too long […]
It all looked so pleasant for The Moderates in Sweden a few weeks ago – Reinfeldt had led the party to a historically high share of the vote, and he would be Prime Minister. Yet just over a week after the announcement of the new cabinet, 2 Ministers – Maria […]
I’ve been browsing around a bit with Google Earth over the last couple of days, including looking at the mad and bizarre website Googlesightseeing – well worth a few minutes if you have never seen it. So what can I use this thing for? Well, if you click any of […]
