Even by the standards of the two and a half turbulent years since the Brexit referendum, the last 7 days have been quite something. Four major events shaped the week, and will shape what happens to Brexit now and – I think – perhaps not in the ways that many...
So there has been no progress on Brexit at the European Council that started last night and is carrying on today, and there will be no extra summit about Brexit mid-November either until Michel Barnier reports “decisive progress” in talks. I’d hoped it would not be so, and that a...
https://twitter.com/BeardedGenius/status/921315451845660673 https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/921323572643139584 What is the answer to that? Via this Buzzfeed piece I know it is an AP image. Looking through AP’s image bank you get to this. It says it was taken by Geert Vanden Wijngaert at October 20, 2017 03:47:29 AM. As AP is New York based, I...
The amusing film of Theresa May at last week’s European Council looking rather confused and isolated drew the predictable reactions – Brexiteers saw it as the EU bullying the UK, while Remain people saw it as a symbol of Britain’s choice to isolate itself. For me the thing that was...
I’ve recently been pondering what happens next in Britain’s attempt to Brexit. The summer, when Theresa May looked like she had most things in hand, is now very much behind us. But at the time of writing we are still no clearer what sort of Brexit the UK government wants,...
Hungary has shut its border to Serbia completely. So the refugees head towards Croatia instead (and Croatia then closes its border), and if the refugees do succeed they may need to cross minefields. Then fears are raised in Slovenia that the refugees might well head there – its PM Miro...
Take a deep breath. Step aside from your preconceptions about the UK and the EU, and your views on David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sakozy. I’m trying to do that when writing this blog entry. Follow the steps of the simplified conversation below, and please comment if I am...
There’s too much still to digest in the fall-out from yesterday’s summit for me to write a full blog entry on it all, but there is one technical point on which David Cameron is wrong. As if he didn’t already look petulant enough, Cameron stated that he would make sure...
Barroso has just finished delivering his State of the European Union address to the European Parliament. While – as before – we had a bit of a chuckle in the blogosphere with buzzword bingo, this was a serious occasion and Barroso rose to it, delivering a speech full of determination that contained...
Yesterday and today NATO Foreign Ministers have been meeting in Berlin, no doubt an important meeting in light of the problems facing the mission in Libya. I also do not deny that these ministers are important people and are a possible target for extremists. But is it really necessary to...
Loads of organisations and companies make their press photos available on Flickr – good. But other than look at the pictures, what is anyone supposed to actually do with them? This was the issue raised this morning when I pointed out that the attendees at today’s European Council are all...
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,...