A sequel to this post is now available! “12 MORE ways to make it look like Brexit has happened“ It’s now two months since the UK’s EU referendum, but all has gone rather quiet on the Brexit front. The British voted for Brexit, not only has it not happened, but […]
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 […]
If you’re astute you will realise that all the numbers in the heading of this blog entry are the same. They are different ways of saying the same thing, namely the amount of money the EU spends on what is called in the Financial Perspectives “Agricultural price support and rural […]
On the Guardian website today there’s a piece entitled “David Cameron to warn François Hollande against challenging EU rebate” by Nicholas Watt. At the start it’s a bit of a ramble, essentially that Cameron will need to push François Hollande on the UK’s budget rebate to try to stick to […]
The EU institutions are in the middle of their annual budget ping-pong. The European Commission proposes the annual budget, and then the European Parliament and Council of the European Union (where Member States are represented) decide on the budget. The Commission’s opening shot for the 2012 budget, published in April […]
“Earlier this week, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Michel Barnier prompted stinging headlines in UK broadsheets for his comments about agencies such as Moody’s that have downgraded their ratings on Irish, Portuguese and Greek sovereign debt. “EU attacked for plan to gag rating agencies” screamed the Indy, while The […]
Tim Montgomerie has written an astounding piece at Conservative Home, entitled “We need to address the abusive relationship rather than just stop the latest punch from Brussels”. For Tim, like many Tory bloggers, any notion of accurate reporting goes out of the window when it comes to the European Union, […]
The FT series this week looking at the EU’s structural funds is – with some caveats due to choice of words – decent investigative journalism. It takes a systematic approach to looking at where the EU’s structural funds go, and where the problems lie. For someone coming to this matter […]
Thanks to a few tweets from @farmsubsidy and a chat with Nosemonkey yesterday I knew I had to look out for today’s FT. Their series, researched together with The Bureau for Investigative Journalism, is entitled Europe’s Hidden Billions and will look at the way the EU spends its structural funds. […]
There’s an interesting piece at Centre Right on Conservative Home that looks at Cameron’s posturing on the EU budget last week (making a similar point to mine about his ‘win’) but also looking more broadly at whether the EU is an important political issue for voters, and what that might […]
The British press has been making a big thing of negotiations on the 2011 EU budget for the past couple of days. David Cameron was apparently telephoning EU leaders yesterday, and on the eve of today’s summit claimed victory that the budget would rise 2.9% rather than the 5.9% proposed. […]
The European Commission has put together the smart video above about the EU budget. Clearly professionally filmed and produced, I wonder whether it will it will convince anyone about the merits of the budget? Yes, OK, it’s 1% of EU GNI, that’s all very well. It’s decided in a transparent […]