I’m very happy to be sat today at the launch event of MyVote2014, a new voting tool for the European Parliament elections 2014. I’ve been working with Michiel, Joan and Doru at VoteWatch Europe, the folks behind the site, to help them with some of the social media promotion of...
“At the TUC conference this week in Brighton, RMT union boss Bob Crow asked his colleagues to back a British referendum on the EU. His call for a referendum was roundly rejected. On the internet, the group Labour for a Referendum has posted three times [1, 2, 3] on LabourList...
In response to Barroso’s State of the Union address today, leader of the ALDE Group in the European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt resorted to his tired old line. The pro-European forces should unite against Euroscepticism, he said, and this will define 2014 European Parliament election campaign. Verhofstadt has been saying this...
As discussion carries on about whether Neelie Kroes is going to actually manage to massively cut roaming fees for data across the EU, or not, thanks to a discussion with @JoeThorpe1963 on Twitter, here is an additional suggestion for Kroes and the Commission. Both Joe and I are regular travellers...
Summer is over. Everyone is back to work tweeting about politics. So that means it’s time to get the political twitter nerds together to meet in real life. For those of you that have not been to one of these before (we’ve run at least three before), the idea is...
I’ve lost track of the number of times people have defended the British First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system with the argument that because the system generally produces a clear winner (a majority for one party), the system hence avoids the need for the complicated coalition negotiations and trade-offs necessary...
Spiegel Online has an interesting article today in English entitled “Britain’s Blind Faith in Intelligence Agencies“. I agree with the title, and conclusion of the piece, but it poses one major question for me: why do the British have this blind faith? This issue has been on my mind a lot...
Alan Rusbridger has this evening written a most extraordinary column on The Guardian’s website about the pressure exerted on the paper by British security services. We are now about 27 hours on from when the initial revelations about David Miranda’s detention first broke. So how, at 0030 CET / 2330...
Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Christian Friis Bach has been coming in for some heavy criticism today on Twitter (his account is here) for his statements about Danish aid to Egypt. As a result I looked at his Twitter profile for the first time for some months and it’s quite...
So the Spain-Gibraltar border dispute rumbles on. Queues at the land border to enter Gibraltar persist, and suggestions abound that Spain may introduce a charge to cross from Gibraltar into Spain. Meanwhile Tory MEP for the South West & Gibraltar, Ashley Fox, has called on the European Commission to take...
Following a few gripes about whether some of the accounts I’ve registered on Twitter in the past break Twitter’s Rules, here is a response. First of all, what accounts do I own that fall into this category? 20 accounts for Ministries of the Danish Government @BskfM_dk @EVM_dk @FinansM_dk @FIVU_dk @FMN_dk...
So here we go again. In response to abuse and threats directed at Caroline Criado-Perez it’s people like @bmitchellwrites saying it’s “Time for Twitter to stand up for women abused online”. Some of his words: It’s about time big organisations acknowledged their responsibility and yes, a duty of care, to...