My trip today, 10 April 2018: Toulouse (population: 467000, 1.3 million in the urban area) to Béziers (population: 75000). Distance 176km by train, 180km by road. Departure time: sometime around 1500. Towns along the route: Castelnaudary (population: 11000), Carcassonne (48000), Narbonne (53000). Beyond Béziers are Montpellier, Nîmes and Marseille. Here […]
A couple of months ago I had a conversation with two academic friends of mine about why they refused to use any messenger other than WhatsApp. “We just want it to work!” they said. “Well, Volkswagen cars work” I hit back. “That’s different,” they said. But then what about fairly […]
English politicians are prone to playing lip service to the unity of the United Kingdom. Theresa May even made sure she visited Northern Ireland on her whistle-stop one year until Brexit tour last week. May leads the Tory Party that is officially called the Conservative and Unionist Party. But how […]
Back almost five years ago I spent a week live blogging from Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship in the English Channel – you can find all my posts from that trip here. Now I am writing this on my way to another live blogging trip – I am going to Charleroi […]
Sometimes a tweet from a politician really hits the mark. So it was with this yesterday from European Council President Donald Tusk: I have just recommended to EU27 leaders that we welcome, in principle, the agreement on transition. In practice, the transition phase will allow to delay all the negative […]
A difference of ideology I can tolerate. Even willful distortion from political opponents I have come to understand. But low quality journalism by those who should know better continues to really rankle. So I was hopping mad earlier today when reading this piece by Gary Younge in The Guardian, a […]
A clever tweet caught my eye this morning: Ever wondered which gender #Brexit is? Obviously male, since 55% of men voted Leave, while 51% of women (and 80% of women aged 18-24) voted Remain. Happy #IWD2018🙂 https://t.co/8IX0doz1ex https://t.co/wqWfIQClid — Peter Ptassek (@GermanyonBrexit) March 8, 2018 It prompted me to think […]
The superficial difference between a Hard Brexit and a Soft Brexit is political control – taking back control, to coin a phrase. A Soft Brexit leaves the UK having to abide by the rules of the Single Market or the Customs Union or both but, as a non-EU Member State, […]
As anyone who has ever read this blog, or follows me on Twitter, knows, I am no fan of Theresa May or her government’s position on Brexit. So it was then not without a little surprise that I did not find myself shouting at the screen while listening to the […]
As today’s predictable fuss about the border in Ireland post Brexit rumbles on, it has brought a deeper and more troubling issue into view. The British Government is now not actually trying to do Brexit, at least in a practical sense. Note that I do not mean here that the […]
Tomorrow – Wednesday 7th February – the plenary of the European Parliament votes on a proposal from the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) committee about the rules for the 2019 European Parliament elections, now just 16 months away in May 2019. What makes this matter controversial this time is the issue […]
Back in December 2015, the board of trustees of Stonewall commissioned a series of essays, each of 1000 words, about the political context in which the charity will operate in the next 25 years. I was asked to the Europe essay in this series. I submitted the essay on 8 […]
