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 […]
Tony Blair has been in California for the last couple of days, and gave a speech to News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch’s media firm) during his visit. Quite apart from the moral issue of whether Blair should be speaking to News Corp in the first place, his speech was both scary […]
I’ve been a bit slow to get round to reading The Spin Doctor’s Diary, Lance Price’s [link to Amazon here] account of his 3 years working in Number 10 and Millbank between 1998 and 2001 – my apologies to readers of the blog that have digested Price’s account months ago! […]
My home ADSL line started to become unreliable a 6 weeks ago, just at the time when Wanadoo became Orange Broadband. I think this is just a co-incidence, but being constantly connected and disconnected yesterday prompted me to call the Orange callcentre to find out what’s going on. Instead of […]
What should be allowed in London’s best known square – Trafalgar Square? This was the issue on my mind as I stood in front of the National Gallery waiting to meet a friend this afternoon. The place is quite busy on a Saturday at the best of times, but today […]
It’s 23:09 on a Friday night and I am writing blog entries. Why? Because for some bizarre reason there have been a whole load of dogs barking in the near vicinity for the last hour that have been keeping me awake. The barking goes on and on and on, and […]
The BBC has this evening posted this article on its website about a ‘happiness map’ produced by an academic at the University of Leicester. Denmark comes out first, followed by Switzerland. While I have no doubt that for the majority of the populations of Odense or Thur those cities are […]
The European Commission is going to have to face a staff cut – or so it seems after EU Finance Ministers have suggested that 1700 staff that retire between 2007 and 2013 should not be replaced. A good summary can be found at EUObserver here. So what do we make […]
I know it’s a very British thing to do, but I am going to write about the weather. Admittedly I have only been living in London about 2 years, but I have lived in Britain for most of my life, and I cannot remember any weather as strange as over […]
Back at the 2004 European Parliament elections, I worked on a project called VoteMatch with some fellow students at the College of Europe (Bob Aal and Tamara Anthony). I met up with Bob recently in London and he reminded me of the site, so I thought it was worth having […]
