Politics & Public Policy

It’s rewarding to know that Ed Miliband (or at least his minions) read blogs, even if incompletely. Last week, I wrote a piece off the back some press speculation about the Labour leader being about to offer a referendum. In that post, I noted that Miliband was going to be motivated to do this because of the […]

The PCC has rejected 81 complaints against The Daily Mail Note: scroll down for updates – this is a breaking story Over 80 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission against the Daily Mail’s story that incorrectly claimed buses and planes to the UK from Romania and Bulgaria were ‘full-up and sold-out’ have been rejected and […]

Despite the usual embarrassment of riches that I could cover, today I’m going to build on some of the thoughts that I discussed some weeks ago, regarding the LibDem’s strategy for the European Parliament elections. During the past weeks, we’ve seen Nick Clegg offer – and Nigel Farage accept – to have a public debate on things European, which will have […]

In my earlier blog post last week,[1] I argued that the creation of DG Clima—the European Commission’s climate change department—was a conscious political choice by Commission President Barroso in 2009. At the time, commentators and policy-makers disagreed on the potential impact of DG Clima on climate policy: some, such as Professor Reinhilde Veugelers from the […]

The European Parliament’s first reading on the fourth railway package (26 February 2014) has watered down both the Commission’s proposal and the TRAN committee’s report. The adopted report opens for more differentiated governance structure, where the member states can decide to create an integrated governance structure where the infrastructure manager and rail operator belong to […]

A couple of things have caught my eye this week in the world of UK-EU relations, one relatively minor, the other potentially much bigger. However, they are linked by a common strand of thinking about how the UK acts and is perceived. The minor thing was an article at the start of the week by Boris […]

In 2009, Commission President Barroso created a new Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG Clima) in the European Commission (EC). This decision was a deliberate political choice following considerable controversy at the time. With European Elections around the corner, and now 28 Commissioners, we may yet again see a re-shuffle of Commission departments. When debating the […]

To look at Twitter (or the academic conference schedule), the European elections are almost upon us. With them comes the familiar litany of concerns about falling turnout, democratic deficits and all the other tropes. While these have some basis in fact, such debates tend to present a rather distorted view of the world (turnouts are […]

Education and research policy have developed at the European level over recent decades. In particular the Bologna Process and the Lisbon/Europe 2020 Strategy have played a significant role.[i] If one, however, examines the actual competences to create legislation for these policy matters at EU level, one finds that these are limited. The EU has only […]

When assessing EU member states’ commitments to climate policy, the UK has long stood out as something of a paradox.[1] On one hand, since the rise in political saliency of climate change in the early 1990s, Britain has done much to assert itself as a leader in climate politics. It has often been at the […]