Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are announcing some preliminary Labour economic policies today, and one of the headlines is a reduction in VAT on petrol, from 20% back to the 17.5% level it was set at prior to January this year. The main argument is that as petrol prices rise […]
David Miliband set out his concerns about the predicament of the European left in a speech at LSE this evening. The full text of his speech is available at Labourlist here, and Next Left has a little post from earlier here. As you would expect from the elder Miliband, the […]
Since the 2009 European Election I’ve kept an eye and an ear open for what MEP Marta Andreasen will do in UKIP’s delegation. Today I seem to have my answer – she’s willing to be just as stupid and poisonous as the rest of them. The issue at stake is […]
It was a Labour Party politics filled evening for me yesterday. First I heard Arnold Graf of the Industrial Areas Foundation from the United States talk at a Labour Values event about how his organisation had built networks of community organisations. Graf works with Maurice Glasman, one of the people […]
It’s so easy for non-EU-phobic politicians in the UK to slip into it: a discourse that membership of the European Union is ‘in Britain’s national interest’. Wayne David’s recent piece for Labour List uses the term three times. Ben Fox, writing for the same site, says: But an In/Out referendum […]
Brussels Bubble dominates EU blogosphere – Public Service Europe.
Here we go again. The next stage of the UK government’s effort to get more Brits into the EU institutions… is to try to skew the application system to assist Brits. Today’s FT has more on the story here. There’s more here about the government’s previous efforts. The essential gist […]
The Fabians are running an event tomorrow entitled “Britain and Europe: In, out or somewhere in between?” I can’t attend the event as I’m in Austria at the moment, so I’ll raise a few points here instead. Frankly, the very title of the event makes me annoyed. Why can we […]
A pedestrian bumps into another pedestrian who is blocking the pavement. The pedestrian gets a wet foot from a loose paving stone and clambers over bags of rubbish on the way to the Métro. The same person takes the Métro, and when leaving the train at Gare du Midi he […]
A piece in the European Parliament magazine entitled “Plans for big shake-up in European elections branded ‘absurd’” caught my eye. It concerns ideas that have been rumbling around in Brussels about how to improve European elections, and the idea to create a transnational top-up list system comprising 25 MEPs of […]
What should Labour’s EU policy be in opposition? What can at the same time be positive about the future, realistic, deliverable, and also decisively different from the coalition’s approach to the EU? Vital questions. The starting point seems to be a few high profile events to talk about this stuff – Policy […]
The diagramme above comes from an excellent report entitled “The Nordic Way” [PDF], produced by Swedish think tank Global Utmaning, and linked from this Bagehot piece about the Nordic countries. The paper itself is worth a read, although take it with a small pinch of salt as it presents a […]
