How the EU is wrecking one African farming sector after another? It can not be said often enough: the CAP is “the most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take communism”. But as usual the countless snoughts in the trough of public money across Europe combine to thwart […]
The Cuban authorities are accusing US diplomat Mike Parmly of passing money from Cuban terrorists living in the USA to Cuban mercenaries living in Cuba. I knew Mike in Sarajevo. Tough operator. As with diplomats in Zimbabwe trying to operate during that country’s madness, Western diplomats in Cuba have to […]
Poland claims to have the EU’s longest ‘external’ border. Hmm. Our coastline is an external EU border. It is over 12,000km long, far longer than Poland’s EU ‘external’ eastern borders with Russia/Belarus/Ukraine and its maritime border combined. But (with so many islands) Greece’s coastline borders are over 13,000km, and on […]
Hot on the heels of my thoughts on how many NGOs are not really NG, here is another pertinent observation, pointing up the sneaky but widespread practice of sending taxpayers’ money to ‘NGOs’ then citing their views as support for the official line! But how to stop this sort of thing? […]
Not long before I left Belgrade in 2003 I had a good discussion with the then Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister, Goran Svilanovic. An astute operator. He said that one of the problems in dealing with the EU is that "you don’t do deals. The Americans love deals, but you […]
I return to Poland this week, my first visit back since driving across the border into Germany at the end of September last year. To help prevent Ambassadors from setting themselves up plumply in the country of their final posting, the UK Civil Service has a rule to the effect that former […]
The Telegraph reports that there is a scary new plan being hatched in Brussels – for the EU to have Embassies. Well? First, the EU already has a goodly selection of Delegations and Offices round the world. They are there to carry out work in policy areas where the EU […]
More on EU Foreign Policy. What is a ‘foreign policy’? Let’s assume that, crudely speaking, it is something like this: What Country A (maybe in partnership with countries B, C etc) does to get another country to do things it otherwise might not do on its own, either because that outcome is in […]
Does it matter if Europe’s population declines faster than in other regions? If it does matter, why does it matter? Here is a neat summary of a few of the issues. I like this line: I can’t shake the idea that the demographic projections are a civilization-wide vote of no […]
EU Referendum’s thoughts on why a ‘European Foreign Policy’ is not a good idea got me thinking. What actually is ‘Foreign Policy’ anyway? Could the EU in fact be good at some aspects of it but not all? What are the pros and cons for the UK of ‘More Europe’ in the […]
