And so another year has passed, and, as was the case with the first of these new year posts that I wrote a few years back, the world is plodding slowly through financial and economic crisis, towards Euro-zone doom and environmental catastrophe. Happy New Year!

Two years ago, I called for a more honest debate, and last year, for worthwhile action. Frankly, with both of the major crises facing us—not to mention the innumerable other lasting tragedies of our world—both of those things are lacking. (more…)

It’s cut a bit long, but the video above is worth a watch. I like the concept of a direct and consensus based decision making process, but… (more…)

Brussels threatens to sue Britain to let in ‘benefit tourists’

The Telegraph

Another day, another anti-EU story in The Telegraph. Normally I resist the urge to dissect articles like this, but this one is particularly annoying. The gist of the story is that the big bad bullies in Brussels want to change British (Rule Britannia, Britannia Rule the Waves!) law to encourage everyone in Europe to steal benefits from honest, hard-working, decent and down-to-earth English people. (more…)

A slightly belated happy birthday to South Sudan! As I assess my need for new mapping to accurately reflect the way that Africa is carved up as of Saturday, I’m drawn to thinking about the challenges that the world’s newest country faces. It’s perhaps not the best time to be striking it out alone, though splitting from the abusive partner that the Sudanese government, especially under al-Bashir, represents was, on balance, the right thing to do. (more…)

So today sees the last edition of the News Of The World. Having never read the thing, I can’t say I’ll miss it much, but the whole scandal of its demise raises at least a couple of important questions: first, how does Britain manage to regulate the excesses of the press, without castrating it, and second, how can the over centralisation of media power, as seen with Murdoch, be avoided? (more…)

There are times when you just have to despair at the degree of selfishness that people (even/especially important people who have to make big decisions) can display at times. I wrote the other day about the Polish objection to tougher CO2 emissions reduction targets, but now today the European Parliament decided that lunch was more important than voting on a report on raising emissions reductions targets.

Lets get this straight: some MEPs thought that it was more important to go for lunch, than to do their job, finish voting from this Part Session, and make progress on an important report on a hugely important topic. I don’t know what was in the canteen today, but judging from the usual fare they offer up, I struggle to see how those hungry MEPs were unable to resist it.

Poland really knows how to set expectations! I didn’t have much hope that environmental issues and countering climate change would be high on the agenda during the Polish presidency of the Council of Ministers, but with Poland standing alone against an attempt to tighten CO2 emissions reduction targets, I guess any hope that the EU will try to up its game for the COP17 climate talks in Durban this December are pretty much scuppered.

The public rationale behind the Polish position seems to be that the country is so reliant on coal fired power stations, that a target for 50% cuts in emissions would be too strenuous for the country. Now I’m sorry, but does a whole continent really have to be held back by poor energy planning in one country?! Surely a better approach would be to work out a way for Poland to transition to renewables, and lower-carbon energy, while letting the rest of us get on with trying something (even if it isn’t much) to tackle the problem?

As is usually the way of these things, Brussels is alight (at least, the constitutionally geeky bits of it are) with talk of transnational lists for the next European Parliament elections in 2014. As far as I can tell, this radical idea hasn’t filtered through to the national level. Which is kind of odd, since the whole exercise is meant to bring the people closer to ‘Europe’.
I kind of like the idea of having a set of MEPs elected from a pan-European list, hopefully elevated above the usual popularity contest politics of European elections. It’ll probably mean a lot more French and German MEPs, but they dominate Brussels anyway.
What it will definitely mean though, if Andrew Duff MEP (UK, Lib Dem, promoting the new list in the Parliament) gets his way, is a change to the treaties. Now… surely when we’ve just come through a massive period of constitutional change, there can’t be any appetite for embarking on a whole new constitutional convention?! And since it will have to pass through several referenda, including a very hostile one in the UK, does it really make sense to do it like this.
Come to think of it, does it really make sense to do it at all? The level of consultation with national political parties has been quite low, if the absence of mention of it in my own party is anything to go by. Though I like the idea, the practical side of putting it into place seems to have been thought up entirely within the Brussels bubble: not the place that an initiative to bring citizens closer to the EU should really spend its formative years.