Poul Nyrup Rasmussen has today announced he is standing down as President of the PES. Over a period that has been one of relative decline for the left across Europe, Poul has been a voice of determination and reason; I’m sad to see him go, especially as he’s miles better...
Summer is silly season in politics, and I’m doing my best to prove this blog isn’t immune to that, with the second odd David Miliband story in two days. Yesterday’s was about Syria and politics and today’s is about… falafel. I was in Amman, Jordan last week, and one of...
This is a bit of an odd one, but the source is an interesting (and controversial) Danish politician – Naser Khader. Khader has represented three different parties in the Danish Parliament, and now represents the Conservative People’s Party, the party of Denmark’s foreign minister Lene Espersen. On his blog on...
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...
Political Betting has raised the issue of whether David Miliband’s decision to get Diane Abbott onto the ballot paper in the end costed him the leadership. The line is that Abbott being on the ballot motivated more on the left of the party and affiliated organisations to cast their ballots,...
No-one visiting a politician’s website realistically expects the site to be entirely written by the actual individual. But how should a site be written and designed on a candidate’s behalf? Importantly, what person should be used in the text?
I try to see the positives where I can, but I am really struggling this evening. Who actually wanted Barroso, Van Rompuy and Ashton to be running the European Union? It all strikes me as the lowest common denominator of the worst sort. As @kosmopolit pointed out on Twitter, the...
If you don’t like a politician what do you do with him or her? International organisations are always an option. Could this work for Labour and Gordon Brown? Let me explain. Brussels is full of national politicians who no longer had a role in their national capitals; Neil Kinnock was...
The British newspapers have been full of analysis of the resignations of Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears, but the big news is still to come with Brown’s cabinet reshuffle, pencilled in for either tomorrow or Monday next week. For me there are 2 crucial decisions that will determine how all...
I met Dave Keating, author of the excellent Gulf Stream Blues blog, for a coffee yesterday and we started to chat about UK politics. What, he asked me, were my thoughts about Gordon Brown’s prospects? It seems that as the government’s opinion poll ratings have taken hit after hit so...
I sat listening to Obama’s inauguration speech thinking: oh for a European politician capable of something similar! Of course the systems and characters are very different… But Britain, one way or another, is going to get a new Prime Minister sometime in the not too distant future. So I took...
Welt am Sonntag reported yesterday that David Miliband might be a candidate for the EU Foreign Minister High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the foreign affairs position created by the Treaty of Lisbon. A FCO spokesperson has made a very bland statement that Miliband is...