“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...
My 16 month old iPhone 4S had a hardware fault – the power button on the top of the phone would not press properly – it was partially stuck. You had to push the button with all your might to get the thing to turn off, or just to turn...
Two separate conversations in Brussels this week, both with Brits, but with people of very different political persuasions, led me to the odd conclusion summed up by the title of this blog entry – Britain leaving the EU is more likely if Labour wins the UK general election in 2015...
The 0744 København H to Berlin train (although I’m getting off at Hamburg Hbf). Friday 1st March. Two policemen wait at the German border station Puttgarden, board the train at 1040, it departs at 1042, and the two of them reach my seat (at the opposite end of the 4...
One election – in Italy – has just concluded. Another – the by election in Eastleigh – takes place on Thursday. Each in their own way shines a light on the deficiencies of modern representative politics, and there are some contrasts between the two votes that I would like to...
So UK Immigration Minister Mark Harper has said that a mandatory ID card scheme is under consideration in the UK for “Romanians, Bulgarians and other Europeans” according to The Guardian. This immediately set alarm bells ringing in my mind, as EU citizens should be treated the same way as ‘locals’....
Sorry if I am slow to the party, but academic Colin Crouch first coined the term post-democracy in 2004. I only encountered it a few weeks ago through this LSE blog post. Crouch’s words: A post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of...