Politics & Public Policy

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 […]

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. […]

Meng-Hsuan Chou In July 2015, UACES’s (The Academic association for contemporary European studies) European Research Area collaborative research network (CRN) held its second workshop at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) in Cambridge. Knowledge policies continue to be at the forefront of contemporary global politics. There is an accepted belief among policymakers that […]

In these dog days of summer, there’s not much happening in the world of EU politics. Except the on-going debates on the third Greek bailout, arguments about managing asylum applicants and immigrants and the simmering British renegotiation. And the third of these is very much the least, certainly in Continental terms. To date, the renegotiation has been […]

The failure of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference marked a shift in international climate governance. As the system of agreeing international emissions reductions targets and then negotiating individual country contribution towards that target proved increasingly unworkable, there has been a drive towards a much more bottom-up form of climate governance. In preparation for the Paris […]

Last week two front page stories by The Mail displayed shocking disregard for accurate reporting or any care for the plight of desperate asylum seekers trying to reach the UK from Calais.

Lut Mergaert and Emanuela Lombardo[i] The European Union (EU) officially committed to gender mainstreaming in the 1990s, fixing the principle in treaty articles, action programmes, and communications, and setting up institutional bodies and mechanisms to promote the incorporation of a gender perspective into policymaking. However, the implementation has not reflected these official commitments. This is, […]

Inga Ulnicane The 22nd International Conference of Europeanists ‘Contradictions: Envisioning European Futures’ was held by the Council for European Studies (CES) at the Sciences Po, Paris, July 8-10 2015. During the three days, more than 1000 scholars from around the world discussed their research on Europe in more than 300 sessions, roundtables and plenaries.   […]

Should we say thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands? I must admit we were not sure how to start the report Evicted Rights: Right to Housing and Mortgage Evictions in Spain, published by Amnesty International – Spain on 23 June 2015 (see here in Spanish). According to judicial statistics, there have been nearly […]

A former UKIP MEP, Ashley Mote, has been jailed for five years for defrauding the European Parliament of almost half-a-million pounds. On sentencing Mr Mote today at Southwark Crown Court, Mr Justice Stuart-Smith told him: “Your greed and dishonesty were matched only by your hypocrisy, because while this was going on you carried out a […]