Polly Toynbee has written a column in The Guardian today about Sweden, this time analysing the threat of Fredrik Reinfeldt to Persson’s government in the forthcoming elections. Toynbee often raves about the good things in Swedish society, and has generally been astute about Swedish politics in the past, but today’s […]
I’ve been trying to work out what my answer to that question should be for some months now, and attending the United Seminar of JEF in Norway [my blog entry, pics from JEF-Sweden’s blog] a few weeks ago helped me to clarify some of my thoughts, now summarised in this […]
French politics has its downsides – the domination of an ENA-educated elite being the principal among them – but la politique àla française has normally managed to avoid the more vulgar approach typified in the UK and especially the USA. Not so for the 2007 Presidential election it seems. […]
It’s part of France Telecom, one of Europe’s largest telecommunications groups, but Orange’s UK broadband service is really getting me down at the moment. The broadband connection where I live in Clapham keeps on breaking down at all the times I want to use it (weekday evenings and weekends), and […]
Somehow my reservation in the train from Newport back to London on Sunday was in the Family Carriage. 4 small kids were sat close to me, completely ignored by the parents, and hence make an almighty racket. This was further compounded by the woman sat next to me who spent […]
I’m now 99% confident that I have everything sorted out for my new place to live – I’ll be moving sometime in September to Villa Street, Walworth [map], and Helena will join me there from late September. This is in the Camberwell and Peckham constituency, so Harriet Harman will be […]
The fact that you are reading the blog entry is quite something; once more the website server that I administer for Europäische Bewegung and others has suffered some serious problems. I’ve hence been burning the midnight oil, or more like consuming the 2am cups of coffee, to try to solve […]
Hell. What a day. In a strange way the reports of today’s planned attack are worse than the actual attack on the London Underground last year. Somehow the threat of a land-based or surface-transport attack is always with us – a suicide bomber can kill scores of people with a […]
I woke up this morning – as so many Brits did – to the news on the radio that a terror plot has been foiled to try to plant bombs on planes via the hand luggage of passengers. Details from the BBC here, no details yet of the backgrounds or […]
I’ve made a few technical changes to the blog over the last 24 hours. Unfortunately the direct links to Polish and Swedish translations have had to be removed – they just do not work reliably any more. The solution is to use the excellent WorldLingo translation tool, but visitors will […]
London has a problem: a severe lack of housing. Further, it has one of the lowest population densities of any European capital city – most areas of Paris are far more densely populated [see this excellent comparison from Wikipedia]. It’s mostly thanks to all those rows of red brick houses […]
I’m off for 4 days to Scandinavia so the blog will be quiet; it promises to be a fun journey. I fly to Oslo this evening, then spend Thursday and Friday in the Finnskogen, a wooded area to the north east of Oslo. I’m giving a speech on EU welfare […]
