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 […]
I’ve been deluged with a load of bile on Twitter today about exports of cars manufactured in the UK to the rest of the EU (see here, here and here). There is even the line that “sales to the EU are so low”. I do not deny that there has been a slump […]
A few weeks ago in Brussels I had a cup of coffee with Roberta Metsola. Since April 2013 she has been a MEP after the resignation of Simon Busuttil. Roberta and I studied on the same Masters programme, and it was good to chat and catch up. One question she posed […]
According to Philip Stephens in the FT “Facts finally collide with ideology on Europe“, as his column gives solid backing to the FCO’s Balance of Competences review. The reports are “shorn of ideology and political judgments” he says, while “Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Paterson and Philip Hammond were among cabinet […]
So with rather little fanfare, the UK Government’s EU balance of competence review has today published its first six reports (links to PDFs here). The first six reports concern Taxation, Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid, Health, Foreign policy, Single market and Animal Health and Welfare and Food Safety. So what can […]
My challenge this morning was to build a systematic, and free, way to keep an eye on breaking news about UK-EU relations. Of course I have had ad hoc ways of doing this until now, but for a project I am working on I needed to make it more systematic. The […]
“I don’t want anything to do with the European Movement. They are federalists!” Those were the words a British friend of a friend in Brussels said to me this week as we were discussing what sort of organisations would be needed in the UK to make sure any eventual in-out […]
