Democracy & Citizenship

Never trust experts. It was experts who said the Titanic couldn’t sink. It sunk. Two years ago experts said that Greece would sink and would have to leave the Euro.  It hasn’t – and it didn’t. In July 2012 Ireland’s ‘Independent’ newspaper reported that experts predicted a 90% chance that Greece would leave the Eurozone […]

Ace BBC journalist John Humphrys broadcast classic myths about the European Union’s budget on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme yesterday. If he can get it wrong, is it any wonder that the British public is so confused? At 8:35am on Friday 7 November, John interviewed European Commission spokesman, Jakub Adamowicz, about the EU’s demand for an […]

This week I’m in Oslo, to attend a small part of the celebrations of Norway’s bicentennial for its constitution, with a conference on democratic constitutionalism in the EU run by ARENA. Despite finding myself in a room with lots of constitutional lawyers, the experience the first day has been very positive and given much food for thought. The […]

Lorna Ryan In a recent paper, ‘Governance of EU research policy: Charting forms of scientific democracy in the European Research Area’ (Science and Public Policy 2014), I explore, prompted by Alan Irwin’s work (2001), how the ‘scientific citizen’ is constructed within current policy and decision making processes’.  The paper is based on my efforts to […]

As we enter the last 200 days of this current Parliament, it’s perhaps useful to spend a moment thinking about where the UK finds itself in relation to the EU. But this is a very reductive reading of the situation. Let’s start by considering UKIP, seeming standard-bearer that it is of the anti-EU movement. Carswell’s […]

UKIP, a political party whose polices are based on a profound fear of immigrants, has just had their first  MP elected by the people of Clacton, a town which is over 90% white British, with hardly any immigrants.  Yet in London – one of the world’s most diverse ethnic cities, where less than 50% are white British […]

While we wait to find out whether UKIP can secure their first elected MP today, I’d like to take a bit of a bigger view. This comes on the back of a couple of events in the past week that I attended on the future of the EU, one as speaker and one as audience member. A common theme […]

It’s conference session again and so a useful time to gauge where parties are at with their positions on the EU. Labour’s leadership largely avoided the issue, mainly because of the continuing pressure from various factions to press for a referendum on membership. Given Miliband’s anticipation (justified or not) that he will be in Number 10 in […]

30 years ago, the photo of François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl holding hands in Verdun, the emblematic battlefield of World War One, went around the world. It is true that their gesture – which Kohl always insisted was a very spontaneous one – was quite unusual. Still, it was appropriate. After all, reconciliation between France […]

As we roll into the final week of the Scottish independence referendum campaign, things look to be closer than many (including myself) had anticipated: even if a No vote looks more likely than not, the success of the Yes campaign in mobilising and motivating voters mean that this will be a deeply consequential vote whatever […]