Earlier this month European Sleeper announced its first route – Brussels-Amsterdam-Berlin-Prague – and the news was gushing. Euronews covered the story, saying how it was driven by flight shame, TimeOut talked of a “a ton of cool new sleeper trains“, and Travel+Leisure talked about a “major upgrade” of night services. […]
Yesterday the European Parliament Conference of Presidents agreed that two Committees – INTA and AFET – would vote on the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) this week, but that any decision as to when the plenary of the European Parliament would vote on it was deferred. The decision was […]
A Twitter thread by Jeff Jarvis caught my eye yesterday. “I far prefer blogs to email newsletters & podcasts” Jeff wrote, and I agree with him. I mused about why this was over my morning espresso. I pondered further during a cable internet outage at lunchtime. And now, when I […]
A friend alerted me to this tweet earlier today, knowing full well a combination of political nerdiness and geographic geekery would appeal to me. And since then I have been playing the New York Times “Can you guess how these neighbourhoods voted?” game and wondering about… the political geography of […]
In 2009 I asked my parents to buy me a bicycle trailer as a birthday present. It was a Croozer Cargo, original 2003-2013 model (no longer manufactured, but you can find the manual for it as a PDF here), and cost £160 back then (about €200). Looking back little could […]
🆕 09.06.2022 – Now 156 Towers mapped on Google Street View and loaded into Geoguessr, inc. my own discovery in Nuits! 🆕 It was one of those COVID-lockdown walks – go and explore every last street in my neighbourhood. At Bergholzstrasse 11 (edge of Tempelhof towards Neukölln) I stumbled across […]
Days before the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) finally emerged on Christmas Eve, the European Parliament had already expressed its concern at the process, and refused to be bounced into last minute ratification as the House of Commons was. Chair of the EPP Group Manfred Weber wrote this at […]
The elevation of David Frost to Cabinet, and him largely replacing Michael Gove as the UK Government’s coordinator of all things Brexit, understandably generated considerable debate. Jill Rutter penned a piece for UK in a Changing Europe about what we do and do not know about the UK Government’s new […]
Does Keir Starmer think Ministers should act legally? We don’t really know. Apparently the public do not think politicians should ask for other politicians’ heads during a health crisis, so that’s Labour’s line: Sir Keir Starmer says he will not be calling for Matt Hancock to resign over the unlawful […]
Trains are a good thing. Capable of shipping huge quantities of people and freight over long distances and doing so without most of the downsides of road or air transport. Politicians of pretty much any political colour will be happy to say they are pro-rail. 2021 is even European Year of […]
For years on this blog I have painstakingly been documenting the Brexit saga – in more than 50 diagrams and more than 200 blog posts. I don’t know if anyone can really have described themselves as a Brexit expert back at the time of the referendum, but over the past […]
One of the consequences of leaving it so late – 24 December 2020 – to agree The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was that ratification could not be completed before the Agreement entered into force on 1 January 2021. The European Parliament stated it would not have the time […]
