Back in 2002 I was doing a poorly paid internship at Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin and my then boss (who subsequently has become a good friend) Bernd Hüttemann said to me on my very first day “Jon, there’s no point you making travel bookings for me, it’s just […]
At the time of writing the EU’s European External Action Service (@EU_EEAS) was following just 4 others on Twitter – all other parts of the institutions, and not even any Commissioners or MEPs. I tweeted this, and it drew sharp reactions from @dicknieuwenhuis who works for the Commission on web […]
The idea is simple, the map is stylish and easy to read, and the code is open source – welcome to skoleporten, the interactive map of Norwegian school results for junior schools (5th grade) and secondary schools (8th grade), produced by Evan Westvang, one of the programmers at Origo.no. More […]
There’s an interesting piece at Centre Right on Conservative Home that looks at Cameron’s posturing on the EU budget last week (making a similar point to mine about his ‘win’) but also looking more broadly at whether the EU is an important political issue for voters, and what that might […]
There seems to be a fundamental misconception at the heart of the ‘debate’ about Cameron’s Big Society ideas. This misconception is fed both by the discourse used by the Tories themselves, and the media reaction. Take this piece in today’s Guardian for example – councils are wondering whether some sort […]
The British press has been making a big thing of negotiations on the 2011 EU budget for the past couple of days. David Cameron was apparently telephoning EU leaders yesterday, and on the eve of today’s summit claimed victory that the budget would rise 2.9% rather than the 5.9% proposed. […]
I’m in Brussels for 36 hours and have just been on the panel at Edelman | The Centre’s event about whether social media can help bridge the gap between the EU and its citizens. I’m not sure any of the panellists (@MarietjeD66, @lauradagg, @ryangheath, @cybersoc or I) managed to fully […]
“Newspapers / the media / leafletting / canvassing [delete as applicable] are surely the least of his problems!” Can you really imagine a UK political activist saying any of those four possible phrases about the campaign for someone running for mayor of a London borough, and not leaving themselves open […]
On October 7th Eurostar announced a £700 million investment plan to purchase 10 new 16 car e320 trains from Siemens that will run from 2014, and from 2011 onwards upgrade the interiors of its existing 28 trainsets. Following that DB showed two ICE3 trainsets at St Pancras on 19th October, […]
Attending Personal Democracy Forum, re:publica and other equivalent events has – both directly and indirectly – opened my eyes to the writing and thinking of a whole group of US public intellectuals. I’ve had fun meeting Jeff Jarvis, have heard Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow present, and have […]
On October 19th Jon Cruddas delivered the Aneurin Bevan Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Taking back the Big Society”. The text of the speech is available at Liberal Conspiracy here and if you’ve ever heard Jon Cruddas deliver a speech live you can almost imagine how he would have delivered it (I […]
The European Commission has put together the smart video above about the EU budget. Clearly professionally filmed and produced, I wonder whether it will it will convince anyone about the merits of the budget? Yes, OK, it’s 1% of EU GNI, that’s all very well. It’s decided in a transparent […]
