So Juncker is now certain. 26-2 in the Council, 422 of 751 in the European Parliament. I have analysed the High Rep and President of the European Council positions at the LSE EUROPP blog here. But who has been nominated by the 27 other countries? (Luxembourg’s Commissioner is Juncker) Austria...
Back in my days as a civil servant one phrase dominated UK government-speak: evidence-based policy-making. The essential idea was to gather adequate evidence about a problem, and how various solutions could work, and determine a policy choice based on that. Now of course this was constrained by the ideology of...
So the Ukraine crisis has taken a turn for the worst over the last couple of days. What – if anything – can the EU do to make Putin listen? See if you can do better than Ashton, Sikorski and Bildt in the new Crimea Crisis Response Generator (based on...
The High Rep is appointed by the European Council, acting by qualified majority. However as the person is also a Vice President of the European Commission, their nomination has to also be approved in the same way as the rest of the College of Commissioners. If 2014 works as 2009...
The Foreign Minister of the EU’s 6th largest country (Radek Sikorski, Poland) arrives in the UK and gives a speech on 21st September lambasting Britain’s policy towards the European Union and the reaction is… almost non-existent. Isn’t that a bit odd? Let me explain a little more. At the time I read...
Today has been a normal sort of day for me online, in that I’ve stumbled across a couple of really fascinating things, stuff that’s brilliant. Today it was the Lytro camera, and an examination of the design work of Dieter Rams. Earlier this week it has been Solar-Powered 3D Printer that...