OK, it’s not my sole ambition to be on TV! But I remember as a 16 year old thinking: some day I would like to be interviewed on television or radio speaking a language that’s not my mother tongue. To appear in such an interview would mean I was doing […]
A Labour Deputy Leadership website for Harriet Harman. 12 websites for Labour politicians, with plenty more in the pipeline. Online campaigns for One President of the EU (finalist in the 2008 New Media Awards), cricket as an Olympic sport, and atheist bus adverts. A forthcoming site to map the EU […]
Welcome to my personal blog – it’s here that I outline my views on EU politics, Brexit, German politics, Berlin politics and technology. Previously the blog also covered transport policy, but those posts were moved to a separate site in February 2023. I’ve been blogging since 2005, making this one […]
What makes good politics? It has been a sort of obsession of mine over the years, although I have never actually written the question in that way before. On this blog I have looked at the fortunes of the Yes Campaign in Scotland, the Brexit referendum, the Catalan independence movement. […]
Bernd Hüttemann earlier pointed out to me that the mood section of the Facebook app for iOS has a mood “in favour of leaving the EU” but none in favour of remain. I scarcely believed it! But now I have checked and it is true. I am using an iPhone […]
I’ve organised my fair share of Facebook campaigns over the years – some with tremendous success and others that went nowhere. I’ve also spoken to people who have run major Facebook activities in the past, people like Anton Abele whose Stop Street Violence campaign became front page news in Sweden. […]
On October 19th Jon Cruddas delivered the Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Taking back the Big Society”. The text of the speech is available at Liberal Conspiracy here and if you’ve ever heard Jon Cruddas deliver a speech live you can almost imagine how he would have delivered it (I […]
The Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets has caused a load of hand-wringing. Why? Of course it’s absolutely wrong to deny freedom of religious expression, and the outcome of the vote is wrong. I’m no fan of any religion but here the Voltaire quote seems apt: “I do not […]
“I just don’t get Twitter” – words I often here uttered in political circles in Brussels and London. How can 140 characters be used to communicate effectively? This is a first effort to explain how to use Twitter in a political context. Firstly the Twitter slogan “What are you doing?” […]
One of the great things about the Twitter is that it allows you to be rather silly and flippant about serious topics – just look what we managed with @AtheistBus. But this post is about EU politics. For today, in a discussion with @JulienFrisch, @spiller2 and @kosmopolit, I managed to […]
I sat listening to Obama’s inauguration speech thinking: oh for a European politician capable of something similar! Of course the systems and characters are very different… But Britain, one way or another, is going to get a new Prime Minister sometime in the not too distant future. So I took […]
So I’ve spent the last four days in New York, one of the world’s great cities. So what do I make of it? I was staying with a friend who works at New York University and lives in a university flat on West 3rd Street / Mercer Street in Greenwich […]
