May 2005

Comedy home secretary Charles Clarke does have his uses, though. Last week, he stated that he would use the UK presidency of the European Union (when he will chair the council of interior ministers) to improve cross-European preparedness for natural disasters and major terrorism. He mentioned specifically that the financial system was vulnerable to cascading…

The Government’s crusade to breathe life into its dead ID Cards scheme ran deeper into trouble this week. First, along with the old-new Bill, the results of the Home Office’s trial of biometric identifiers were out. The HO tested its gizmos on 10,000 guinea pigs/citizens, and came back with a best result of a failure…

People will be searching for this, so just to cover… An Antonov-12 aircraft was destroyed in the DRC on Thursday, with a reported loss of 27 lives. As far as I know, the registration was 9Q-CVG, which if true belongs to a Boeing 707 last heard of being scrapped in Kinshasa, ex-Hewa Bora Airways. The…

Just back from a trip outside the EU, to Norway as a matter of fact, to ask questions of a bunch of Chinese telecoms people who just put in the first US-type (CDMA-450, fact fans) network in Europe there. Sitting in Oslo airport, waiting for a colleague to rock up from Stockholm, the sweating hack-gaggle…

Back in late 1942, the British Army’s Bureau of Current Affairs prepared a guide for the soldiers who were about to move into Tunisia as the 1st Army landed in Operation TORCH and the 8th Army completed its march from Alamein. Thanks to the lads from ARRSE, we have some pages from it… You may…

This is deeply depressing. “Britain’s first hi-tech identity cards are being issued to London workers today, the Evening Standard can reveal. The cards, containing details of credit history, criminal records and immigration status, are being introduced to combat identity theft and illegal working. Hundreds of staff at City banks, blue chip companies and government departments…

As everyone probably knows by now, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is trying to call new elections after a cudgelling from the electors of Nordrhein-Westfalen. I say trying, because unlike in Britain he doesn’t have direct control over the dissolution of parliament, and he may have to arrange his own defeat in a vote of no-confidence.…

Richard North has answered my question, stating that neither he or Helen Szamuely has been paid for their efforts with the Bruges Group. However, EU Referendum Blog still doesn’t carry any disclosure of their association with the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities (the European Parliament caucus that includes UKIP) or the Bruges…

Democracy is something we do. It’s not in the structures, but in the practice of democracy, that its benefits emerge. So, I’m kicking off a series of blog posts on how to be a democratic Europe. Or, if we want a more democratic EU, how we can do democracy in Europe. As a start, Nosemonkey…

In Vienna, they’ve started running freight over the tram system. The Wiener Linien, the public transport authority, runs perhaps the best system I’ve ever met (especially as they haven’t discovered the ticket barrier yet), including an intricate network of tramways carrying a variety of different trains that I’m not sick enough to detail. The plan,…