So David Cameron’s long-trailed EU speech is due to be held on 15th January. I cannot remember any speech by a UK Prime Minister being trailed so far in advance, prompting Cameron himself to say “This is a tantric approach to policy-making. It’ll be even better when it does eventually...
So Timothy Garton Ash has nailed his colours to the mast in The Guardian, and stated the case for an in-or-out of the EU referendum in the UK to be held sometime between 2015 and 2020. Loads of people are jumping up and down about TGA’s piece – everyone from...
A tweet by Emma Burnell pointed me towards this blog post by Tracy Hill about UKIP, and the threat they pose to Labour. You can read the whole blog post to look at the stuff about UKIP, but there is one paragraph I will highlight, for it shows the problems...
I was a dedicated Instagram user. The app was swift to use, had no advertising, and it was convenient to share pictures from the service to both Facebook and Twitter. There were a whole bunch of complaints when Instagram stopped using the Twitter Cards system for displaying previews of images...
Oh here we go again. It seems the question of how an independent Scotland could work in the EU will never go away. Rather than focusing on the EU’s Nobel Prize, BBC’s Hard Talk asked Barroso about Scotland and the EU in an interview today and, as before, Barroso reiterated...
I’ve been working as a freelancer for more than 5 years. It was at the end of the summer of 2007 that I took that leap, and until now there has been no looking back. I enjoy the flexibility, the fact that I am my own boss, and normally I...
“Lobbyists are part of the everyday political scene in Brussels, location of the main institutions of the European Union. While the debate continues about the exact definition of a lobbyist and hence how many of them ply their trade along the grey corridors of the European Commission and European Parliament,...
Forgive the even more rough and sketchy nature of this post than the normal you find on this blog, but this is about something that has been on my mind a lot recently, and I am struggling to adequately explain. I cannot back up what I am asserting here with...
So the old master is back, working his rhetorical magic at a Business for New Europe / Chatham House event in London yesterday. The full text of his speech is here. At one level I welcome Blair’s intervention in the EU ‘debate’ in the UK – he speaks with a...
If you’re astute you will realise that all the numbers in the heading of this blog entry are the same. They are different ways of saying the same thing, namely the amount of money the EU spends on what is called in the Financial Perspectives “Agricultural price support and rural...
“Jobbik. Golden Dawn. Frank Stronach and the BZÖ. Perussuomalaiset. Partij voor de Vrijheid. Movimento 5 Stelle. UKIP. Piratpartiet. The party-political mainstream in Europe can no longer deny that the game is changing. Even if traditional parties do indeed have answers to the political and social challenges that all European countries...
So Labour has another stab at getting together some sort of EU policy. Ed Miliband is interviewed in The Sunday Telegraph and the only thing that seems to emerge is that Labour needs a “hard-headed” approach to the European Union, courtesy of further spinning from Douglas Alexander on the Andrew...
