A bit of romantic rhetoric from Brussels cannot change the fact that their only offers – before and after we voted Leave – have been provocatively unacceptable.
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. Ed Balls hit the wires yesterday complaining that the “British government is absent from the global economic debate at this critical time.” It’s true, that the UK government hasn’t exactly taken the bull by the horns in the eurozone crisis, but it’s also true that it was on the previous Labour government’s […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. So David Cameron is again attending an EU summit marred by the raging Greek and eurozone debt crisis. As Open Europe has documented and argued repeatedly, this crisis just won’t go away. Following a “row” with Germany over the UK’s involvement in a new rescue package for Greece, […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. That Portugal has joined Greece and Ireland on the eurozone casualty list has become a fact of life – so has the UK’s liability in the latest EU bail-out. Open Europe has looked at the various economic implications of the bail-out for Portugal, the eurozone and Britain in […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. This morning, the European Court of Justice ruled to scrap the insurance industry's opt-out from the EU's 2004 Gender Directive, which will mean insurers can no longer offer different products and prices to men and women based on their sex from December 2012. This may appear like an […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. The members of this Coalition Government pride themselves on being the great de-centralisers and have proposed a series of measures to amend or scrap intrusive domestic legislation. But if this agenda is going to have any credibility whatsoever, the Coalition must take it to Brussels with full force […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. Europe is an absolutely explosive issue – both at home and abroad. For the Con-Lib Dem coalition it involves a number of risks but also huge opportunities. The risk is that the Conservatives turn into their predecessors and try to deny the existence of Brussels. But Europe is […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. Broadly speaking, the UK Government has two tools at its disposal to achieve its aims: budgetary policies and regulatory policies. But while one will feature heavily in the debate leading up to the general election, the other will be almost completely absent. This is unfortunate, because as boring […]
Mats Persson is Research Director at Open Europe. An argument heard in some corners is that employment and social policy is the “wrong battle” for an incoming Conservative government looking to bring back powers from the EU. EU social legislation is stuck in neutral, the argument goes, and picking a fight on these laws would […]
Mats Persson is Research Director at Open Europe and author of its latest piece of research, Out of Control: Measuring a decade of EU regulation, which exposes exactly how much EU regulations are costing Britain. He summarises its findings here. Over at Open Europe we’ve spent a tense six months trying to do what many […]
Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe. For real time updates from across the EU and eurozone, follow Open Europe on Twitter. It has become clear, over the past few months, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to reopen the EU Treaties in order to beef up the rules on eurozone economic governance, giving the […]