Am I a pro-European? A pro-EU person? A Eurosceptic? An EU-sceptic? A Europhile? An EU-phile? A Europe-phile? A Europhobe? An EU-phobe? I don’t know. Does anyone really know? Does anyone actually think about these terms? In UK discourse about the EU it’s all too simple to throw in the terms […]
This blog entry is a partial response to the Presseurop / The Guardian My Europe series The man in question is Princeton Professor Andrew Moravcsik, mastermind of the theory of liberal intergovernmentalism, that goes further than any other to explain the EU’s current predicament. The three stages of the theory – domestic […]
The way Yes To Fairer Votes makes the case for AV didn’t strike me as correct when I first read their website. I am all in favour of simple, compelling arguments, but when over-simplification results in statements that are only tangentially linked to the matter at hand something is not […]
Today’s Guardian has an article entitled “Public to choose policies as coalition gets the X Factor“, stating ministers will ensure that the most popular petition on the government website Direct.gov.uk will be drafted as a bill. Sigh. There is not a hope in hell that this is going to work. […]
A Very Public Sociologist has completed a second annual survey of the number of Twitter followers of people who also write political blogs in the UK. I finished up 34th on this list last year, now I’m down to 61st. Other people who blog alongside their main non-media day job […]
April 2, 2001. Less than a decade ago, but the European Union looked rather different, and the careers of 3 politicians looked rather different. Enlargement to central and eastern Europe was in process at that time, and the Euro would be found in citizens’ pockets less than 8 months later. […]
Snowy pavements are not the same as pavements with broken paving stones – both of them can cause you to trip and fall, but the former happens all at once when it snows heavily, while the latter happens gradually over the years. That’s why countries like Belgium* and Germany have […]
There’s always an advantage to being the first to use some new technology. Or at least there should be, if it’s done well. While the rest of the world has been thinking up good iPhone (and other mobile) apps for some time, these things are thin on the ground in […]
The screenshot above shows the oldest results from search.twitter.com for “EUCO Berlusconi”, and explains how the Twitterwall story started (I’ve previously posted about here and here). Just to set the record straight this is exactly what happened. First, I realised that tweets containing #EUCO would appear on the Twitter wall, […]
There’s a legendary story for those of us that look at political activity on the web that concerns change.gov, Obama’s platform to allow the public to put forward their political ideas that went live the day after he was inaugurated. Give the people a platform, so the argument went, and […]
There are two live Twitter walls at today’s European Council in Brussels, as shown above in this Twitpic from @EUCouncilPress. All you have to do is put #EUCO in your tweets. A few of my contributions so far: All EU Countries: fair trial and follow the legal process for Assange. […]
There have been a couple of watershed moments in UK online politics in the last few weeks, notably the reaction to the Wikileaks cables and the decision of a number of well known British political bloggers to stop blogging, importantly Iain Dale and Tom Harris. These developments are related and show, […]
