New year, new EU Presidency, and a new debate about the European Constitution? This week should make things a bit clearer I hope… Friday and Saturday this week the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the EU is hosting a conference in Salzburg amusingly entitled “Sound of Europe“, and I […]
An opinion poll in today’s Irish Times finds that 78% of Irish citizens want to re-introduce a permit system for migrant workers from the new EU member states, and a majority of the population thinks that enough immigration has taken place. The article can be found here. It strikes me […]
Sometimes a certain story just manages to capture the public imagination. This weekend, London has been lucky enough to benefit from such a story – the Thames Whale. See the coverage from The Observer here, The Sun here, and then it even reached Dagens Nyheter and Spiegel. Saturday was a […]
Now, if there is one issue that tends to get people motivated, it is EU enlargement. Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn was in London on Friday and, among other things, gave a speech at LSE about his work. Yet his speech, and especially his means of answering questions, were such a […]
Commissioner Margot Wallström is due to release her White Paper on EU Communications at the start of January, and – surprise, surprise – the whole thing is getting quite messy and complex. This line in an article in European Voice is illustrative of the problems that Wallström is facing: During […]
There’s been a good reason for the blog being a bit quiet recently: I have been working like crazy to get the website Europatermine.de complete for JEF and Europ√?ische Bewegung in Berlin. It’s needed a hell of a lot of hours of PHP work and neverending requests from the organisers, […]
There is an excellent post on the New Economist blog (read it here) that discusses a recent study about whether there is a correlation between working hours and income inequality – simply put, the need to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ and to work to get the possessions that others […]
The Brits have apparently reached the point where their credit card debt is starting to decline, but according to this interesting article in USA Today, we still have an average of $5188 of credit card debt per person – about ??3000! Remarkable that is the average figure! Further, one in […]
Whenever I fly with Ryanair I always seem to have the bad luck to end up sat close to some Aussies in the plane. Does not even seem to matter where: they have been on flights to Stockholm, Altenburg, and now to Berlin. Now I would not wish to generalise […]
After Polly Toynbee’s “The Most Successful Society” piece in the autumn, The Guardian has tempered its tone about the Nordic model in this piece by Nicholas Watt. The analysis is not too bad – Sweden does, without doubt, have a problem with its integration of ethnic minorities and I suspect […]
Every able bodied Muslim is supposed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca during their lifetime, and yet it seems this duty is bound to involve fatal sacrifice for some. This year 345 people have died today (as I write – the number may increase) and more than 1000 have been […]
Have we not been over this ground before? Immediately after the French and Dutch No votes, everyone started to debate whether the European Constitution was dead or not. Then the Brits came along with their Presidency and put the lid on all talk. Now with the Austrian Presidency, the farce […]
