Concrete Achievements

Tag: europe

  • Good point, this. Labour has to be very careful that in accepting reality it doesn’t…

    Good point, this. Labour has to be very careful that in accepting reality it doesn’t argue that the reality is good – it wouldn’t with NHS funding, for instance. twitter.com/PascalLTH/stat…

    The other point is that UK rejoin-minded people also have to remember that this isn’t a UK-UK conversation, and that UK half-in is not going to be on offer. It might be single market/customs union rule-taker, but in will mean properly in, euro, Schengen and everything.

    And while younger people are pro-EU, more so than older, unless UK performance is dramatically divergent from EU27, which despite its current bad leadership is unlikely, the internationalist case is hard to make.

  • Links from the week of 31 January 2022

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 13 December 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • I wasn’t in Florence for #cofoe #TheFutureIsYours, though @demsoc colleagues were.

    I wasn’t in Florence for #cofoe #TheFutureIsYours, though @demsoc colleagues were. I see a lot of people here talking about one recommendation (on more European citizen assemblies) but it’s worth saying there were almost 40 others, on a much wider range of issues.

    For me the most interesting recommendations were those on rule of law and media freedom, confirming that these aren’t just elite/Brussels bubble concerns but the concerns of citizens from around Europe.

    Also worth noting is how much citizens overall saw Europe as a level of government that needed direct accountability to them – not surprising in some ways but a big change from the state-based proto-confederalism that is the structural logic of today’s EU.

    This came out most clearly in the recommendation on (what are known in Brussels as) transnational lists for the European Parliament – a voting system that would force candidates to appeal across national boundaries.

    So read the whole list to see a lot of interesting ideas, beyond more CAs, delivered in a very short time. Over to the citizen ambassadors and the others at the conference plenary to see what they can do with this raw material.

  • Links from the week of 6 December 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • “American-style governors” is the British political pathology in a phrase.

    “American-style governors” is the British political pathology in a phrase. They won’t be constitutionally established elected leaders, but they will be *named* after something American because this generation of Tories have a teen crush on the US. thetimes.co.uk/article/americ…

    “American-style governors” will – whatever the promises – inevitably be dependent on the Treasury and Whitehall so will be more elected regional managers than political figures in their own right.

    And, of course, there are better examples closer to home that are better adapted to the UK system but are invisible because they don’t happen in English and politically unacceptable because they are European.

    If someone wants me to write a piece on “German style Minister-Presidents could level up England”, my rates are reasonable.

  • Links from the week of 15 November 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Links from the week of 8 November 2021

    Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.

  • Common EU borrowing to get round the debt brake?

    Common EU borrowing to get round the debt brake? German coalition negotiations are giving me policy whiplash.

    (From @POLITICOEurope morning briefing)

    “Back in his Berlin hotel room, Emmanuel Macron smiled as he removed his Christian Lindner mask. His plan was almost complete.”

  • The New Yorker piece on the flood of new fiction is good, but I feel the same about…

    The New Yorker piece on the flood of new fiction is good, but I feel the same about policy articles. Most blogs should be a tweet, most articles a blog post, and most books a blog post. And still there would be too much to read.

    I have many policy preferences (all of which are, I assure you, the inevitable logical consequence of whatever is leading the news cycle today), and yet I am reluctant to add to the flood.

    I mean, “democratic innovation person favours democratic innovation”, “European social democrat favours greater European solidarity”, “person worried about climate change thinks we should do more on climate change”

    “Extracted from my forthcoming book, Democratic European innovation for a fair climate change transition (590pp, €100).” Not only have you read it all before, you don’t even have time to read it.

    And, I will not lie, I often put an article in the “skip” pile because I know the position of the person who wrote it and I assume it’s just arguing that position based on some current news hook.

    And yet … I feel like if I *don’t* put something out there, I’m not contributing to the debate on the issues I care about, and I don’t have time to do something really beautiful or crafted that I would be proud of as a piece of writing…

    It’s Publish or Perish: Policy DLC pack. Unanswerable I suppose, unless I start doing policy interventions as freeform dance expression.