At yesterday’s AGM, I asked HSBC what impact the UK leaving the EU would have on the bank’s optimistic plans for the future. Their group chairman, Douglas Flint, replied, “It is important that Europe comes out stronger and Britain remains at the heart.” He added that whilst there’s uncertainty around what the trading relationship might […]
Today I posted pro-EU arguments under a Daily Telegraph article about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK. Clearly, my comments were unwelcome by DT readers. They called me ‘a moron’, an ‘utter idiot’ and told me ‘to get medical help.’ So much for elevated debate. This was my comment: All UK […]
Having already spent some time this week discussing Thatcher and the EU, there is a temptation to revisit the topic as part of the on-going efforts by (seemingly) every political commentator in the country to appropriate her memory. However, such obsessing with the past is a big part of the British dysfunction when it comes […]
Welcome to Jon Danzig’s new ‘EU ROPE’ blog, where the links between the UK and Europe are explored and discussed. Stories so far: BBC’s John Humphrys got it wrong about Europe Why did UKIP win in Clacton? Press Complaints Commission: Daily Mail breached The Editors’ Code A country called Europe? Europe Moves – The ‘EU Earthquake’ […]
Raya Kardasheva is a Lecturer in European Politics at King’s College London. Hello Europe, here they are – the educated, the jobless, the hungry and the ruthless. They studied the European project. They believed in the European project. They acted on the European project. Their generation is truly European – they travel without borders, they […]
by Dr Jack Holland As those of you who have taken my modules will know, unlike my colleagues, I’m not really one for European Politics. It’s all bratwursts and talking and complicated voting and irrelevant bodies and banana straightening and the French. For me, it lacks the, y’know, global relevance of American foreign policy or […]
by Prof Alex Warleigh-Lack Dear Chancellor Merkel, I am writing to ask you to rethink your insistence upon extreme austerity as the cure for the Euro-zone’s economic problems. If you do not change your mind, and if you do not work to make such a shift politically possible in your country, you risk deepening […]
In these times of crisis for EU Member States, labour market reforms in a handful of countries have come to be seen as the final turning point for the so-called 'Euro-crisis'. This is because labour market reforms are those 'structural reforms' that have been regarded as necessary ingredients in the recipe to put Southern Member States' economies on firmer grounds.
It’s that time of year again, when the European Commission releases its draft budget for the following year, to howls of anguish and disgust from all sides. I’ve already talked some weeks ago about how the EU budget isn’t like national budgets and shouldn’t be compared to them on a like-by-like bias, but today I want to address a slightly different […]
Many economists, pundits and policymakers in Europe think that China is in an ideal position to rescue the Eurozone from its debt problems. The main argument goes more or less like this: China has $3.2 trillion foreign reserves, of which two thirds are in US dollars and only one quarter is in euros. It would […]