The removal of Godfrey Bloom’s whip this week, in the wake of his comments to the annual conference, reminds me that the role of MEPs in UKIP has long been an unhappy one. In the party’s earlier days, it was the MEPs who held a lot of the financial and human resources, to the point […]
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A couple of pieces this week have brought me to consider how difficult the non-sceptic side of the EU debate has become in theUK. My rather awkward choice of ‘non-sceptic’ is used advisedly, following Jon Worth’s line about the pointlessness of being ‘pro-European’. As I have discussed before, there is no one euroscepticism, but rather […]
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I must begin by being clear that this post is driven as much by my personal experience of a bad night last night as it is with recent events across Europe. The announcement of a nightmare at some very early hour by one of my children, the calming-get-down to sleep and then my own lying […]
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Returning from UACES, and eager not to get lost in the big pile of emails that awaits me, I spent some time thinking about how to integrate all of the things that I’d been hearing over the past few days. While my focus had been mainly on euroscepticism, I also listened to sessions on the […]
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The first day of the UACES conference in Leeds was very instructive for me. On the back of our special issue of JCMS, the organisers let us have the opening plenary session to discussion the impact of euroscepticism on integration, and the outcome was considerable. We invited Nikki Sinclaire to join us for the plenary. […]
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As a policy analyst, I am naturally interested in the dynamics of domestic politics, the role of specific actors, institutions and communities. So I understand why so much talk in Britain yesterday and this morning was and is about party politics. I am struck, however, by how much mainstream media attention this morning is focused […]
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