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– being a compilation of instant, sometimes off-the-cuff reactions to the day-to-day Brexit saga ……     Brexit ‘deal’ or ‘no-deal’ decisions risk becoming irrelevant 30/01/2019. As I look out at a snowy winter garden, last night’s weather in the UK House of Commons has at least cleared some of […]

    Thursday 15/03/2019 should have been a momentous day in the UK’s long-running Brexit saga. The third of three days of key Parliamentary votes, on how the UK withdraws from the European Union, was meant to determine if the political deadlock in the House of Commons and the country […]

Brussels, 08 February 2019. While Brussels politicos spent yet another day thrashing about the future form of Brexit amid today’s visit from British Prime Minister Theresa May, the EU Council quietly announced this week that it has reached preliminary agreement with the European Parliament on interoperable information systems in justice […]

Update, 10/12/2018, evening. It seems Prime Minister Theresa May decided to postpone the vote – no surprise there. What happens now is anybody’s guess. Brussels, 10/12/2018. Channel 4’s excellent ‘The Real Brexit Debate’ last night was thought provoking. Four UK Members of Parliament; James Cleverly, Barry Gardner, Jacob Rees-Mogg and […]

Brussels, 07/11/2018. My abiding image of the First World War is of the trenches. The fortifications that marked the front line between 1914 and 1918 spanned much of Europe, yet in Britain the strongest folk memories come from those in France and Belgium, the appalling carnage of the Somme and […]

      Oxford, 15/10/2018. I was musing on the consequences, mental as well as physical, of having an ‘off’ in the last few days. My incident happened last Saturday at dusk, when in a moment of lost concentration on a road I didn’t know, I failed to see a […]

Brussels, 09/10/2018. Europe’s pension savings gap remains dangerously large, exceeding €2 trillion a year, which is about equivalent to 13% of Europe’s GDP (Mind the Gap 2016, Aviva). This is by far the biggest financial issue facing EU citizens, their children and grandchildren, believes Better Finance in Brussels. With government […]

Brussels, 19/09/2018. It was at the Byline Festival in August 2018 that I first became acquainted with the term PACs, or Political Action Groups, when American journalist Caroline Orr discussed the baleful influence of so-called SuperPACs on the American democratic process. I had not heard the term before, though had […]

Oxford, Sept 2018. Overland Event at the end of August 2018, in Hill End camp near Oxford, was inspiring and mundane in equal proportions. Inspiring because it brought together the largest gathering of long-distance motorcycle travellers I have seen, and mundane because in other respects it was a normal, if […]

The cellar in my old house has reached a wall temperature of 20 degrees. For the first time in 28 years, it is actually warm. My local climate has changed – does such climate drying warn of future human disaster, or is this too far-fetched? 13/08/2018. The climate change ‘is […]

Brussels, 12/06/2018. The Civil Liberties committee of the European Parliament (LIBE) has called on the EU Commission to suspend the EU/US Privacy Shield agreement on data exchange of personal data, since this (relatively new) agreement still fails to provide sufficient data protection for EU citizens. Privacy Shield should be suspended […]