The UK has floods once more – this time in Cumbria. 60000 homes are without power, and the region had record rainfall. That follows floods in winter 2013-2014 in the South West of England. On 14th February 2014, The Independent and a few more newspapers had stories that the UK […]
In June and July 2007 parts of the UK were hit be severe floods. The EU has a Solidarity Fund to help its Member States deal with natural disasters, yet in the months after the floods wrangling continued about whether the UK would get any money from the fund, and […]
I happened to catch a few moments of PMQs today, and Alan Beith asked a question about how EU funds were being denied to the North East, while Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were still eligible for the same funds, essentially unused cash from the European Commission £178bn economic stimulus […]
Labour MEP Glyn Ford submitted a written question to the European Commission, asking how the €162,387,985 EU Solidarity Fund (EUSF) money should be spent. I’ve twice posted about this matter before, when it looked like the Treasury would try to keep 2/3 of the money for its own uses to […]
Things have moved on a bit in the argument about EU money to the UK to help regions hit by floods last summer, the subject of this post. NEW – Helga Truepel MEP is now on the warpath on this one, having written a press release on the issue (EN […]
When any part of Europe is hit by a natural disaster, the country where the disaster strikes can appeal to the EU for assistance – these solidarity arrangements were put in place after the 2002 central European floods. So when parts of the UK were flooded last year it seemed […]
“He doesn’t like not being liked,” said Katie Perrior of Boris Johnson in this 2016 of the then outgoing Mayor of London in this 2016 essay by Jeremy Cliffe. Those words have stuck with me since reading that essay back then, and today it is perhaps time to revisit those […]
I gave a speech this week to PES members of the Committee of the Regions about digital communication in the run up to the European Parliament elections. The Q&A with the members was especially interesting, and one question – from a mayor from Greece – prompted me to write this […]
Last week’s printed edition of Focus had a piece about how Germany’s politicians are using social media. It made the dubious claim that 61% of Green top candidate Katrin Göring-Eckardt’s Twitter followers could have been bought (JPG of that part of the Focus piece here). Let’s actually instead try to get […]
In mid January I was more or less offline for a fortnight as my laptop had a serious problem (more about that here). Yes, of course I have a smartphone, but I tend to access social media the old way through a web browser, and Twitter through Tweetbot on my Mac. […]
Nick Clegg has today joined the race among UK political parties to sound tough on immigration to the UK from the EU, and Mark Leonard (someone who ought to know better) has written a piece for the Fabian Society advocating that Labour ought to be tough too. Let’s just quickly […]
Here we go again. The next stage of the UK government’s effort to get more Brits into the EU institutions… is to try to skew the application system to assist Brits. Today’s FT has more on the story here. There’s more here about the government’s previous efforts. The essential gist […]