Politics & Public Policy

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 […]

Chiara Carrozza I spent part of my morning browsing The Researchers’ Report 2014 developed in line with the key priority of ensuring the “free circulation of knowledge” in the European Research Area (ERA), and a relevant part of it focuses on the progresses made at both European and national level in removing or alleviating some […]

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 […]

Recent data from the Global Carbon Project show that worldwide carbon dioxide emissions—the main driver of climate change—are set to reach a record-breaking 40 billion tones in 2014, led by a 2.5% rise in fossil fuel burning. In order to maintain a 66% chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees—a widely accepted safety threshold—global […]

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 […]

In February 2005, three months before the French referendum on the constitutional treaty, I went to some of the first public information meetings on the stakes of the vote to come. One was organised by a local pro-European association, one by a local Member of the French parliament. At that time, the polls predicted a boring campaign with a positive vote by […]

It’s tempting to say that it’s been a classic summer for exposing the failings of British EU policy, but it would be more accurate to say that it’s been a summer much like any other: poor. May’s European elections exposed both the continued appeal of UKIP and the low level of public engagement (0.9% rise […]

The Press Complaints Commission has upheld three of my complaints against the Daily Mail. The commission ruled that the newspaper breached The Editors’ Code of Practice on accuracy with its story about buses and planes from Romania and Bulgaria to the UK being full-up and sold-out. On New Year’s Eve last year, the Daily Mail […]

Isaac Kamola In recent decades the world has witnessed massive expansion of higher education. The total number of universities is continuing to expand, as is the total percentage of the world’s population receiving college degrees.[1] Many governments, most notably in the Middle East and Asia, are spending large amounts of money on higher education in […]

In 2008, with the passing of the Climate Change Act, the UK government set the target of reducing CO2 emissions by 80% of the 1990 baseline by 2050. The setting of this target, coupled with targets set at the European level, furthered the need for new, innovative approaches to the reduction of CO2 emissions that […]