As appears to be usual in these matters, as soon as I am away from my blogging, there’s a whole cavalcade of eurosceptic-ness that appears. Thus I’ve missed out on explaining the joys of the additional UK contribution to the EU’s budget – short version: it’s complicated, but not that complicated – and much of […]
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Last month the Birmingham Policy Commission published ‘The Security Impact of Drones: Challenges and Opportunities for the UK’; available online here. It is recommended reading for anyone interested in the topic of ‘drones’, or remotely piloted aircraft/remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPA/RPAS) as they are more meaningfully described. In particular, the report usefully highlights the fundamental […]
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This week I’m in Oslo, to attend a small part of the celebrations of Norway’s bicentennial for its constitution, with a conference on democratic constitutionalism in the EU run by ARENA. Despite finding myself in a room with lots of constitutional lawyers, the experience the first day has been very positive and given much food for […]
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A leitmotif of the the British debate on the EU is that ‘we’ don’t always/often/ever (delete as applicable) get what we want. Thus, we’re told about all the times the UK gets outvoted, or the structural impossibility of UK MEPs blocking anything in the Parliament. What is interesting is the conceptualisation that underpins this view. […]
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In this week’s POL1012 Introduction to Politics: Power and the State seminars, on Rational Choice theory, I ran a prisoner’s dilemma game with the students. This is something I have done for several years now but this time I wanted to make a record of what happened. Students were told that they had been arrested […]
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As we enter the last 200 days of this current Parliament, it’s perhaps useful to spend a moment thinking about where the UK finds itself in relation to the EU. At one level, euroscepticism seems as rampant as it’s ever been. UKIP have secured their first elected MP, and only narrowly missed out on a […]
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