Conference on the Future of Europe today "in a subdued ceremony designed to have as few people as possible notice it’s happening"
Via @MehreenKhn
Far cry from the Laeken declaration, showing how moribund & subterranean EU federalism has become

amp.ft.com/content/231dcd…
The merit of the last convention was that it was at least constitutional meaning it was openly declared in a mega-treaty and then rejected by voters, mothballed after French and Dutch voters. Before being enacted as Lisbon treaty without votes
This exercise does not even have the merit of a constitutional aim and expresses the EU's dismal zeitgeist rather well as the private property of declining and accountability dodging elites who eschew vision because that invloves public politics
It is a great pity because Europe needs an open and rigorous debate on the EU's future rather than this carnival of low expectations and evasiveness. @guyverhofstadt would have been the man, that he was sidelined is very telling

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More from @BrunoBrussels

10 Mar
Couple of things to note on Oxford-AstraZeneca and questions over exports from with implicit allegation that Britain has beggared its EU neighbours by withholding vaccines
UK has in fact suffered similar supply shortfalls - AZ a third of what was anticipated by end of Q1 2021
AZ, only approved vaccine being manufactured in the UK, has a decentralised manufacturing model. It's not-for-profit, low cost and open licensing as aim of scaling up global production quickly
UK tax-payer funded that development, enabled clinical trials & global manufacture
Hence the huge capacity being developed by Serum Institute of India in India or Australia's development of its own manufacturing. One of objectives of Oxford project was to ensure that AstraZeneca produced the vaccine for globally
Read 6 tweets
9 Mar
. @eucopresident has fanned flames of a growing row
He claimed today that UK has "imposed an outright ban on the export of vaccines or vaccine components produced on their territory"
This is "completely false" according to UK
All countries, including UK and many EU members, have restrictions on wholesale of pandemic medicines - think PPE
Read 4 tweets
17 Feb
Reap the whirlwind. Europe's anti-vaxx nationalism bearing fruit here. Hardly surprising after Germany, France and others called the vaccine into question on Purley political and irrational grounds

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
In Berlin out of 30,000 doses of the vaccine delivered last week, only 990 had been administered so far
theguardian.com/world/live/202…
87,533 out of 736,800 delivered doses of AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered by yesterday
Read 4 tweets
2 Feb
This Von der Leyen interview is a classic of the genre
No apologies, move along now nothing to see here, in fact things are better than expected and those who are doing more quickly are irresponsible

lemonde.fr/international/…
She unrstands the upset but ACTUALLY EU vaccinations going quicker than originally planned
“Things went faster than expected, which is good news: we didn't expect to start vaccinating until spring"
Never mind comparisons....
UK might be ahead but... Britain took, for her and the EU, unacceptable risks by authorising early jabs in breach of "gigantic responsibility" to follow "safety and efficacy requirements"
Never mind that the EU is using the same vaccines, just a lot later
Read 5 tweets
1 Feb
Her spokesman blamed Valdis Dombrovskis, trade, whose chief official Sabine Weyand wrote the NI protocol. The whole saga is still surrounded by lies, #1 being that Von der Leyen knew nothing about it
Von der Leyen's spokesman said: "This regulation falls under the responsibility of Dombrovskis and his cabinet and of course the services of the commission which respond to him"
That puts Weyand, DG of trade, right in the frame to be fall guy. She is most brilliant official of her generation, so would be quite some act of self-harmm
Read 5 tweets
20 Dec 20
The government has created a mutation monster as the frontiers now shutting because of the scare - Dutch, Belgian and German travel bans so far…
Marc Van Ranst, the Belgian virologist - and no stranger to sounding the alarm himself - has had 4 cases in his lab and sees the mutation as a “minor variant” only
“The new variant in England does not cause any additional concern,”
Belgium will close airports and Eurostar terminal from midnight for 24 hours as precautionary measure. “We don't have a conclusive answer yet,” said the PM De Croo
Read 8 tweets

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