Democracy & Citizenship

In an article for the Yorkshire Post this weekend, American expert in ‘Anglo-American relations’, Dr Ted R Bromund, argued the UKIP case for Britain to leave the European Union.   Dr Bromund, a senior research fellow at The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in Washington DC, wrote that on a recent visit, London didn’t seem so […]

Leaders of the European Union should revive Winston Churchill’s post-war vision for a kind of  ‘United States of Europe’, urged  EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso this weekend. ‘We need to show the same political courage and vision of Winston Churchill,’ said Mr Barroso.  ‘He was a man of foresight with an acute sense of history, often […]

The idea to promote familiarity, mutual trust, a collective European identity and support for European integration by giving citizens the possibility to interact across borders is at the heart of a wide array of EU policies, such as the Erasmus student exchange or town twinning projects. This idea goes back to Karl W. Deutsch’s transactionalist […]

The past week has been something of a trip to the past for me. For many years, watching eurosceptics and anti-EU groups was characterised by endless cries that they were fighting ‘the system’, outcasts who had seen the truth and railed against almost impossible odds. That idea of righteousness that underpins such a worldview is one that I […]

Anonymous eurosceptics seem to be everywhere, posting en masse in the readers columns of our national newspapers. And whenever I post a pro-EU comment – always under my real name – they’re there at the ready, trying hard to discredit me and calling me ‘dishonest’. Of course, they mostly never seem brave enough to post […]

Yes, Britain should end its EU membership to solve the problem of ‘Roma beggars’, according to prominent Tory Eurosceptic MP, Douglas Carswell, reported The Telegraph this weekend. The newspaper complained that, ‘more than 20 Roma beggars living rough in London’ were given tickets home funded by the taxpayer, but they ‘have already returned.’ Yes, six of […]

The removal of Godfrey Bloom’s whip this week, in the wake of his comments to the annual conference, reminds me that the role of MEPs in UKIP has long been an unhappy one. In the party’s earlier days, it was the MEPs who held a lot of the financial and human resources, to the point that they constituted […]

A couple of pieces this week have brought me to consider how difficult the non-sceptic side of the EU debate has become in theUK. My rather awkward choice of ‘non-sceptic’ is used advisedly, following Jon Worth’s line about the pointlessness of being ‘pro-European’. As I have discussed before, there is no one euroscepticism, but rather […]

Academics studying the EU should be the real eurosceptics. Not only can we translate the greek word skepsis as "enquiry”, modern science owes much to philosophical and methodological scepticism. However, it seems that academics interested in the EU have struggled to come to grips with a the phenomenon of political euroscepticism which appears to be quite a different thing compared the philosophical notions of skepticism.

Both the Daily Mail and Daily Express stated that EU law has to be changed so that foreign doctors can have their command of English checked.  They claimed such checks are currently “banned” under EU law.   The Mail reported, “Patients lives are being put at risk by doctors whose English language skills have never been tested because it is […]