Gergely Polner (@eurocrat on Twitter) normally knows his stuff about the EU. Sometime spokesperson for the Hungarian Presidency of the EU (still the best social media outreach by Presidency), then head of public affairs for the European Parliament in the UK, and now head of EU affairs for the British Bankers’ […]
Tag: UK-EU Relations
How Juncker shines the light on Britain’s problematic, unitary pro-Europeanism
I am not a fan of Jean Claude Juncker, the person and the politician. I am a lefty, he is a christian democrat, and he – ideologically – stands for a future of the European Union that I, as an individual person, do not agree with. Yet I am also […]
What percentage of cars manufactured in the UK are exported to the rest of the EU?
I’ve been deluged with a load of bile on Twitter today about exports of cars manufactured in the UK to the rest of the EU (see here, here and here). There is even the line that “sales to the EU are so low”. I do not deny that there has been a slump […]
What I would have written for CiF… Being pro-EU in the UK must not just be a proxy for British business in the EU
[I wrote this piece, unsolicited, for Comment is Free of The Guardian today. They did not want it, so I publish it here instead] Last week on these pages the CBI’s John Cridland set out why leaving the EU would be bad for British business. Business grandees such as Richard […]
So Cameron starts a charm offensive across the EU
Realising his speech in January did not go down too well in EU capitals, David Cameron is this week embarking on a charm offensive across Europe. He’s visiting Madrid, Paris and Berlin, among others, basically trying to sell to others his call for repatriation of powers, oops, no, sorry, that […]
The UK-EU argument is a proxy for the vital debate about the UK’s economic, geopolitical and democratic future
There are two common, and incorrect, justifications for not acting in politics. The first is that now is not the right time, because at the moment everything else is more important. That is the justification most often used by opponents of an In-Out EU referendum in the UK, and is […]
How much does it cost a country to buy some influence in Brussels?
It’s one of Tony Blair’s best known phrases, a promise to put Britain at the heart of Europe. Leaving the big issues (Euro, Iraq) to one side, any relationship with the European Union needs people to make the relationship work, and that’s the focus of this blog entry – where […]