Current Affairs

A guest contribution by Moses Onyango and Jean-Marc Trouille. In many parts of the world, geopolitics are confronted with two anti-nomic trends. On the one hand, numerous countries are engaged in a process of regional economic integration, epitomised by the more advanced model of the European Union (EU), and which requires ‘internal’ borders between participating […]

The revelation of Volkswagen’s deception has left consumers, politicians, national authorities, and environmental organisations reeling. Trust in big business and industry has taken a nosedive, but it is not the first time a big company has deceived consumers and authorities, and it is unlikely to be the last scandal.  Given the lobbying power of car […]

Last week’s announcement from Drax (the energy company that owns and operates the largest power station in the UK) that it would no longer invest in Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) development at its Selby plant came as little surprise. The news joins a litany of other stumbling blocks that CCS has suffered on its […]

If you want to check for impurities in a swimming pool you don’t have to test all the water. You can just dip in a test tube to analyse a sample of the pool to get an accurate guide to the state of the rest of it. And so it’s been with the Daily Mail. […]

The Volkswagen emissions scandal has many dimensions, some of which have not even started to unfold yet. The sheer perversity of the software used by the company with the aim of hiding the real level of nitrogen oxide emissions of its cars is most likely to become a textbook case of corporate hubris and cynicism […]

It’s not been often that I’ve had cause to write about Labour and the EU in the past four or five years: apart from Ed Miliband’s semi-drift into referendum commitments last year, there hasn’t really been much of a policy. A general sense that it’s A Good Thing, but largely a continuation of the positional policy-making that […]

It is difficult not to be impressed by the remarkable breadth and multidisciplinary outreach of contemporary European Studies that was exposed at the UACES conference in Bilbao. Paper and panels were fed and underpinned by the political sciences, but also by economics, law, sociology and anthropology. Yet the newspapers read during the return flight from […]

Last Wednesday, Jean-Claude Juncker delivered his first State of the European Union (SOTEU) address. This speech – the longest since Barroso started yearly SOTEU back in 2010 – is a key agenda-setting moment for the Commission President, providing the opportunity to set out a personal vision on the major issues facing the European Union today. […]

What a difference a summer makes. Only last June the Evening Standard’s front page lauded that Britain’s support for continued membership of the European Union was the highest ever. Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday’s front page turned that around, with a poll showing that for the first time most British people want to quit the […]

Some of the media seem to be in a state of panic this week with the news that the number of foreign-born people living in Britain has reached 8 million, and net migration to the  UK has reached record levels. So what’s the big deal here? Not all those born abroad can be described as […]