There have been rumblings for a while about the inbalance in the UK political system where MPs from Wales and Scotland can decide legislation only applying to England. There was also the absurd example of Scottish MP John Reid, representing a Scottish constituency, but yet being Secretary of State for […]
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. Groucho Marx Well, what has that quote got to do with the European Commission’s selection process, the famous concours? It’s the first time I have written about the concours here but I am indeed one of the […]
OK, anything must be better than Silvio Berlusconi, but you have to get a bit scared when one of the first references to Romano Prodi in recent times on BBC News Online talks of his plans to reconstruct a Catholic pilgrim route – see this. It is clear that Prodi’s […]
It’s one year before the next general election in Sweden, and I am forever surprised by the very negative nature of the political debate. Look at Sweden from almost anywhere else in Europe and things look very, very good. So why can’t the Swedes see it? As a starting point, […]
OK, so my time in JEF is over. It gives me free evenings, and the release from the responsibility is so, so welcome. But the Congress in Strasbourg leaves a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. The main political resolutions I wrote – on the situation facing the […]
Well, people might not have liked the idea much, but Merkel sat down with the SPD and it looked like everything was going to plan to make a grand coalition. Merkel would be Bundeskanzler, and the SPD would hold the finance and foreign ministries. But in the last few days […]
Quick blog from Stansted Airport just before my 07h20 flight to Baden Baden, before heading on to Strasbourg for the JEF Congress. I have just a couple of days more in JEF, and it’s both with relief and sadness that I am on my way out. Fingers crossed that the […]
No, Britain has not joined the Euro (alas). But UK citizens have finally been given European Health Insurance cards – pictured. A number of countries, including the UK, had 2 year derogations to the Directive. All EU citizens should have the cards by the end of 2005. Any information about […]
Somehow intuitively anyone who has visited the UK will tell you the same thing: the country feels very divided between the rich South East (where I happen to live presently) and the rest (where I grew up). There have been numerous studies about this matter in the past, and there […]
Quite strange, but 2 articles about Sweden have appeared on the main UK news websites today. The first is a written account of a report on BBC 2’s Newsnight yesterday, about how Linkoping is pioneering the use of cow entrails for the production of biogas, and how this is then […]
He’s the newspaper columnist I have the greatest respect for, so when Will Hutton writes an alarmingly critical column about the EU, you need to listen. You can read the column here. His argument is not so different from ones I have advanced on this blog – that Europe just […]
He’s on the way out, and now he just looks bitter. Gerhard Schröder has today had a good rant at the EU in Die Zeit – see an article from EUObserver about it here. Now, I have written positively about how Schröder should have been willing to attempt a traffic […]
