Yesterday, John Dalli resigned as European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy. This follows an investigation by OLAF, the EU’s antifraud office into a complaint made by tobacco producer Swedish Match. The EU’s antifraud office was looking into whether a Maltese entrepreneur had tried to sell access to Dalli. According to the Commission’s press release, the OLAF report did not [...]

Last week foreign ministers from ten EU countries published the initial outcomes of a series of meetings of the ‘Westerwelle Group’. This group, named after the German foreign minister, has held meetings over the past three months. The ministers’ objective is high-minded: set out a new vision for the future of Europe. But the outcome is underwhelming: there are many [...]

As someone who works in communications – and who is ‘pro-European’ – I often despair of the way the European institutions communicate. Yes, some of the issues they handle are dry: explaining qualified majority voting or telling people why a Treaty of 300-plus articles is a good thing is no easy task. Yet the lack of success seems to have [...]