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...
Charles Grant’s poor pieces yesterday about national parliaments and EU decision making set me thinking: what think tanks are there that actually are trying to come up with solutions to make EU democracy work better? Yes, I respect ECFR and Bruegel, but EU democracy is not the main focus of...
EUObserver has an article today entitled “Think-tank blasts EU commissioners’ pensions package“. The ‘think tank’ in question is, of course, Open Europe, and the article quotes their press release on the Commissioner pay issue: Taxpayers around Europe, whose pensions have been swallowed up in the recession, will rightly question why...