The world has been asking themselves who the “mystery professor” Joseph Mifsud is. The British press – Byline and Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian – have been connecting Mifsud to Alok Sharma and Boris Johnson. Mifsud has good Russian connections and is supposed to be the person who facilitated the […]
A story caught my eye in The Guardian this morning. “Former candidates sue Conservative party after missing out on MEP posts” it is titled. Remember that MEPs are elected on regional lists, and each party puts up as many candidates as there are to be MEPs elected in a particular […]
At the height of the Eurozone bailout crisis, Alexis Tsipras went to address the European Parliament. Why bother with that? was the cry of sceptical journalists who have never paid attention to the European Parliament. 887000 viewers of Guy Verhofstadt’s response show that this was a worthwhile political exercise – […]
It’s a familiar refrain: that the EU is not adequately democratic. You’ll hear it in the Brexit referendum campaign, most notably from the advocates of the UK leaving, but even David Cameron’s letter to Donald Tusk this week (full letter PDF here) touched upon the issue: Yet this week in […]
I listened to a speech by President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, in Berlin this morning at the Soul for Europe conference. It was typical Schulz, full of bottled up indignation and frustration, railing at national solutions to transnational problems, and how challenges like climate change and the refugee […]
This afternoon I tried to go into the European Parliament. The EU institution that is supposed to represent people like me – citizens of the European Union. I am not a lobbyist or a journalist or an employee of another EU institution. So I could not get in. I approached […]
Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament and wannabe Commission President, was on BBC World’s Hard Talk yesterday (4th December 2013), and used the following words: You used the term that I am a European federalist. I have never in my life used it that I am a European federalist. […]
When I worked for National School of Government I used to accompany groups of UK civil servants on study trips to Brussels. The aim was that these visits would give the civil servants a first taste of the EU environment. On one visit to the European Parliament an old friend […]
When changes to EU law are going to have an impact on business, businesses lobby. That is normal. That business tries to use financial clout to increase its influence in Brussels is also normal; that’s why we need things like the transparency register and websites like LobbyPlag to see who […]
An association for European Young Entrepreneurs. Sounds like a fine idea, right? Well, not if you mean the Association Européene des Jeunes Entrepreneurs – AEJE (website here). The sole purpose of this organisation seems to be simply to attack all efforts to achieve a single seat for the European Parliament, and to […]
I saw this tweet earlier today from UKIP MEP Derek Clark, complaining that now the “EU is coming for our vacuum cleaners”. His tweet links to this story from the Nottingham Post. So then, with “is this UKIP bullshit” warning system activated in my mind, I set out to find […]
So it looks like the European Council has agreed a real-terms cut in the EU budget for the 2014-2020 period. This has, understandably, been labelled unacceptable by the 4 largest groups in the European Parliament. Yet, fearing coercion from Member States, EP President Martin Schulz and leader of the EPP […]