Dear Gordon, I am writing to you to ask some questions about the European Parliament selection process conducted in your region. I have been accused by Jonathan Ashworth MP of making ‘cheap accusations‘ as a result of my blog entry about the selection of Nicki Brooks so I am writing...
As I have previously lamented, Danish politics has been slow to take to social media, especially Twitter. So today I present my next step to do something about it… As far as I can tell, none of the 20 Ministries of the Danish state has a Twitter news account. So...
It has taken a couple of months to get everything in order, but I am now very happy to be able to announce my most unlikely, and most exciting, project to date as a blogger about EU affairs – I am going on board the Greenpeace boat Arctic Sunrise, as...
It has been an interesting week. My posts about Labour’s MEP selections, and the panel member in the East Midlands, Nicki Brooks, who seems to have selected herself, have prompted all sorts of debate, comments, and e-mails sent to me. My blog even already ranks 6th in Google UK if...
09:05 on 9th April, this comment appeared in response to my blog post about Labour MEP selections, by a chap called Joseph who also did not leave a valid e-mail address and is hence untraceable: Hi Jon, Interesting selections from Labour again ….. In the East Midlands Nikki Brookes was...
“Ed Miliband says the right things when it comes to engagement of Labour party members in selection processes. ‘You’ve got to leave it to party members to make their decisions. And that’s the way it should be’ he said in a recent interview with Mark Ferguson of LabourList. Why then,...
So, as reported on LabourList earlier, Labour’s MEP lists are now out, and I am angry and disappointed by the outcome. The full list of names, together with one line bios, website links, and Twitter usernames can be found at the end of this post, and there is a Twitter...
“Europeans show strong sense of solidarity” – it seemed a counter-intuitive headline (in a tweet from @svaroschi) in these times of social strife. The story was Deutsche Welle’s coverage of some new research conducted by the Open Society Foundations. The summary of the research is here (although that makes no specific...
Realising his speech in January did not go down too well in EU capitals, David Cameron is this week embarking on a charm offensive across Europe. He’s visiting Madrid, Paris and Berlin, among others, basically trying to sell to others his call for repatriation of powers, oops, no, sorry, that...
So the European Commission and 7 Member States finance and commission a European Report on Development. There have been three of them so far (details here), and the latest one – entitled Post-2015: Global Action for an Inclusive and Sustainable Future will be released on Tuesday next week. There’s apparently...
On 4th March, George Osborne suffered a bruising defeat in negotiations in the Council of the EU about bankers’ bonuses. 26 EU Member States wanted limits on bonuses, Britain did not, and as the dossier was voted under Qualified Majority Voting (QMV), Britain was marginalised, and lost. OK, the financial sector...
It’s not quite my normal topic – development aid – but here I am in Paris, sat blogging about the OECD’s Global Forum on Development. Why? Well, in short because I was asked. Linda Warnier who works on online communications for OECD is someone I’ve worked with in the past...