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 […]
🆕 09.05.2022 – Now 152 Towers mapped on Google Street View and loaded into Geoguessr! 🆕 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 a replica Eiffel Tower made of […]
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 […]
I have set foot in the Swiss town of Biel/Bienne more often than I care to remember, and for strictly 6 minutes each time. For that is where the Basel SBB-Lausanne InterCity train crosses the Zürich HB-Genève service, and as my trips are always Basel SBB – Genève, that’s where […]
Slam dunk. Lambast Michael Gove with a hasty tweet hammered out while drinking my morning coffee. Push the emotional buttons of both Remain people and Scottish pro-Indy people in one go. *So* much to unpick in a 10 word tweet! 1️⃣ So Michael, you now agree there is a hefty […]
A question has been on my mind for some time: when is the UK Government going to really begin to do the hard implementation work that is inevitable as a consequence of having signed the Northern Ireland Protocol and the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA)? The answer, I think, […]
Ah. Here we ago again. “Leak reveals Labour plan to focus on flag and patriotism to win back voters“. And the reactions are pretty predictable too – Clive Lewis MP expresses caution, Ian Dunt tries to separate patriotism from nationalism, Sunder Katwala puts up pictures of Labour leaders with union […]
