No Belgium Rollers this week (due to the European Council in Brussels), so a sortie into the countryside of Wallonia instead – 42km from Namur to Tienen, most of it on Ravel 2 (Ravel is the Walloon network of long distance cycle paths). The route is along an old railway, […]
As an alumnus of the College of Europe in Bruges I periodically get e-mails on the student e-mail lists. This one has recently reached me: Dear Alumni, Following the recent elections for the European Parliament, the nomination of the Commission’s President is now on the European Agenda. The European Movement […]
I’m at the final event of the Th!nk About It project in Rotterdam. We havge people from just about all Member States of the EU here, all of them bloggers, and the EP elections are now over. So how about use the knowledge in the room to look at the […]
Much better Brussels Rollers tonight – further, faster, better. Speed topped at 46.1km/h on the descent from Montgomery to Woluwe, and the sprint from Montgomery past Mérode and Schuman onto rue de la Loi was almost as quick. I ended up 3rd in the 2 sprints, but won the hill […]
Britain has ASDA, a rather lousy supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart. Now Brussels has ASDE, the new name for the Socialist Group in the European Parliament. The name stands for the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. Which means the name is not too far away from ALDE, the acronym for […]
One of the great things about the Twitter is that it allows you to be rather silly and flippant about serious topics – just look what we managed with @AtheistBus. But this post is about EU politics. For today, in a discussion with @JulienFrisch, @spiller2 and @kosmopolit, I managed to […]
Before the EP elections I wrote a post expressing my exasperation at the PES when they stated they had a nominee for Commission President but would not state the name of that individual. Now Euractiv is reporting that there could be an alliance of the PES, Greens and ALDE to […]
The European Parliament Election results on Sunday were not good for social democratic and labour parties across Europe, polling 3% less than at the elections in 2004. PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, posting at Labourlist, states rather blandly that “We need more PES, not less PES” so as to do […]
At the ‘we don’t want to oust Gordon’ PLP meeting earlier this week many words were spoken about how the Prime Minister had learnt the lessons of the last week, how he was now going to be better at listening. So what news slips out today? That the Prime Minister […]
Results – all unofficial at the moment – are staring to drift in, and things are looking quite terrible for the left across Europe. So far the left is only up in Malta, Slovakia and Greece (with a decent result also expected in Ireland), and behind elsewhere – poor results […]
Aggghhhhh, it’s another one of those days where Belgium is driving me utterly insane (similar to the post issue the other day). There were two young kittens trapped in the basement of my building, presumably the offspring of a stray cat, and I needed to try to work out what […]
It was the first Belgium Rollers in Brussels yesterday evening – not a bad start to the season. The website says things start at 1900, in fact it was due to start at 2000, and we finally departed around 2030. The first parts were very slow (the first loop on […]
