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 […]
“What I’ve never really understood,” a philosophy lecturer at Merton College who hadn’t taught me asked me at a leaving reception upon graduating in 2001, “was why you actually wanted to study PPE?” My answer then, and as true for me now as then, was short and simple: “Because I […]
A bunch of committed Europeans – Green MEPs Franziska Brantner and Sven Giegold, and Thomas Houdaille, Charlotte Keup, Virginia Mucchi and Spyros Michailidis – have launched a new website called Avanti Europe. It essentially looks like some sort of European version of Avaaz, 38 Degrees or Change.org only, unlike those sites, […]
I’m no fan of George Bush. But he did do one good thing – he lengthened Daylight Savings Time in the USA by 4 weeks, and made Daylight Saving more symmetrical – now clocks change back in the USA the first Sunday of November (rather than last Sunday of October), […]
I suppose I should have had my suspicious that all would not be right with the selection process for Labour’s new MEP candidates when the initial information about the process was so thin. So it’s with considerable sadness and annoyance that it now turns out that one of the very […]
(nudity in the video – not for watching on your office computer) Elmar Brok is a portly German CDU MEP, and a well known character in Brussels. This video of him being accosted by a FEMEN activist poses more questions than it gives answers. I also wonder who the woman […]
Alexander Stubb is there. Herman Van Rompuy is there. So I thought I’d have a go at using the Chinese social network Sina Weibo (Wikipedia | Website). The first headache is trying to work out how to sign up. I speak no mandarin at all. So Google Chrome with built […]
