eurealist.co.uk

Perhaps Gorgon Ramsey is being a little bit hypocritical when he calls for restaurants to be forced to serve home-grown, locally-sourced produce, and fined if out of season ingredients appear on their menus. After all he has built a reputation running restaurants in the middle of London where there is a distinct scarcity of [...]

I am British I was raised and educated as British and until very recently I never considered myself as anything else but British. When Our Present Prime minister was first elected to power I was so inured to being British that I did not even notice that he was Scottish, it was totally immaterial to [...]

For many years those who oppose the first-past-the post system as serving the interest of political parties have suggested that proportional representation is better. But this “solution” does not solve the main problem that representation remains in the hands of political parties who resist a transparent representation of the people of the country. The issue [...]

The Scottish fishermen are concerned about a proposal from the European Commission. That would allow the Commission to give any unused fishing quota from one country to another.
It is felt that the industry which has already suffered a reduction of more than 50% of its capacity because of the Common Fisheries Policy would be further [...]

Cranmer has a post about the new British coins
I quite like them but it seems I have not taken on board the relevance.
It is a creation of postmodernity, which evidences a willingness to combine symbols from disparate codes or frameworks of meaning, even at the cost of disjunctions and eclecticism. It [...]

What is the point of our government acquiring an opt-out from EU legalisation and then transforming our national laws to fall into exact alignment with the original EU legalisation?
It would be reasonable to assume that the opt-out was negotiated in the first place because the EU laws were not acceptable to our government, it [...]

Denis MacShane (Matyjaszek)  Who still advises the government on European affairs (I think ePolitix must mean the EU) has said the Conservatives’ foreign policy is a "disastrous blow" to Britain’s national interest. In relation to the Tories’ ambition to split from the European People’s Party grouping of centre right parties, MacShane said: "David Cameron once [...]

We do not understand why the former Home Secretary should have apparently agreed with other G6 ministers to press forward with the "availability" principle and disregard data protection issues. This is contrary to the decision of the Member States in the Hague Programme, contrary to the advice of independent data protection authorities, inconsistent with what [...]

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE USE FROM THE U.K. INDEPENDENCE PARTY Office of Graham Booth, M.E.P. Member for South West Counties
“It’s Time We Governed Ourselves”
Geoff Hoon, the latest Minister for Europe believes that we should have another “debate” ( * ) about the EU, so that the people of the UK can learn to know and [...]

This website was born out of deep anger and frustration at a political establishment which over the decades has increasingly treated the British public with contempt.
It explains how our democracy is being eroded - and spells out how together we ordinary people can halt the slide into bureaucratic tyranny.
For a brief [...]

This morning MEP Daniel Hannan in his regular spot at the Telegraph confronts the idea of state funding for political parties,
 “If there is one thing we politicians agree on, it’s that the rest of you owe us a living. That’s why you should be alarmed that the Labour and Tory leaders are meeting tomorrow [...]

Alice Thomson in the Telegraph writes about the public funding of political parties and mentions perhaps one of the reasons that both Labour and the Conservative leaders are keen on the issue of public funding.  That of falling membership of the main parties “Instead of playing endless games of tennis with Lord Levy, Mr Blair [...]

  Baroness Harris of Richmond asked Her Majesty’s Government:

How many sections enabling Ministers to amend primary legislation by means of secondary legislation have been included in each Home Office Act passed from May 1997 onwards. [HL4543]

 The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Scotland of Asthal): The table [...]

There’s a story going round that taxpayers already fund political parties through “Short money”, so state funding of political parties would be nothing new. (Another case of the false “we already do X, so we might as well go on and do Y” argument.)
But Short money was only intended to assist MPs [...]

From Open Europe
EU energy policy: Commission bids for new powers over regulation, environment and member states’ relations with the outside world

The European Commission will today unveil its green paper on energy, which has been widely leaked. The paper proposes that the EU would gain power to set member states reserve requirements, and the FT reports [...]