Tragedy hit the Belgian railways today with the crash of two commuter trains at Buizingen. There’s nothing I can add to what has been written about that already – any loss of life is always devastating, and I just hope
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Eurostar reports, everyone says sorry, and normal business resumes
Today the report into Eurostar’s December failings is published, and everything is resorting to normal form. The Guardian and BBC have straight and factual reports about what went wrong. There’s a new @eurostarcomms account on Twitter. Eurostar has published its
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If the Tobin Tax is to become the Robin Hood Tax, shouldn’t we rename VAT the Margaret Thatcher Tax?
Over the last 48 hours there has been quite a buzz on Twitter, Facebook and on various left-ish blogs about a new campaign (campaign site here) in the UK for a so-called Robin Hood Tax. What the hell is a
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Registered 2 days ago – tristramhunt.com – so is he up to something in Leyton & Wanstead?
There’s a piece on the website of the Leyton & Wanstead Guardian that Labour is rumoured to want historian Tristram Hunt as its candidate to follow Harry Cohen who’s standing down. The line is that Hunt would be worse than
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New website launch – Liz Kendall for Leicester West
I can’t remember the last time I was so optimistic about a site launch as today: the election campaign website for Liz Kendall, Labour candidate in Leicester West at the forthcoming general election has gone live. Liz initially contacted me
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Some weird parallel EU communications universe
A retweet from @belitabrux drew my attention today to a Mostra e-book called Opinion Corner. Take a look – it’s well researched, looks smartly designed… but why does it exist? It’s not that different from the (paper) Shift>Mag published by
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Expenses speculation – time to hit MEPs?
Mark Reckons has done an excellent bit of work looking at the likelihood of UK MPs milking their expenses correlating that with how safe their seats are. Meanwhile New Europe has raised the question of if and when the scrutiny
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The EU can’t have its cake and eat it when it comes to relations with the USA
How are you supposed to measure the state of US-EU relations? No easy task seen from Brussels. Earlier this week Barack Obama prompted a bout of soul-searching by stating that he would not attend a EU-US summit pencilled in for
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If you want to be a Eurocrat you have to be an arch-federalist – FT just uses the same old broken frames
It’s good to see that the story that the UK government is cutting funding for the College of Europe is starting to be seen more widely – today’s FT has a story entitled “Funding cut for places at Eurocrat college“.
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We have been at our best when at our boldest – so AV?
Two striking phrases appear in Tony Blair’s 2002 Labour Conference speech – the famous “We have been at our best when at our boldest” and a lesser known line “Thanks to the brilliance and vision of Gordon Brown we have
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I’m a voter in the Leyton & Wanstead selection – make a case, but don’t spam me
A UK general election is on the horizon and my name is on the electoral register in the Leyton & Wanstead constituency in East London. As I’m a Labour Party member resident there for more than 2 years it means
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How much does it cost a country to buy some influence in Brussels?
It’s one of Tony Blair’s best known phrases, a promise to put Britain at the heart of Europe. Leaving the big issues (Euro, Iraq) to one side, any relationship with the European Union needs people to make the relationship work,
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