Can’t find my way home

I’m gearing up for a few days of travel chaos. I’m off to spend Christmas with my parents in France and am booked with BA. though I fly the day before the strike is due to start and come back the day after. But you never know… The boyfriend is also on BA right slap bang in the middle of the strike, so we’ll have to see how that works out. Added to that is my trip to Brussels this weekend on Eurostar which is threatened by strikes as well, and you can see why I thought this list of reminders for travellers was worth repeating. Although the UK isn’t implementing the Rail Passengers Rights Regulation yet (in spite of its entry into force on 3 December) the cross-border services like Eurostar are covered nonetheless.

1. If you travel by air and you are denied boarding, or if your flight is cancelled without notice or is subject to a more than five hour delay, ask for reimbursement or rerouting.

2. You also have the right to assistance and, in some cases, to a monetary compensation in case of cancellation or a delay exceeding 3 hours. In all cases the company has to inform you about your rights on the spot, when an incident occurs.

3. If your luggage gets lost or damaged, you have the right to a reimbursement of up to €1223 when you take the plane.

4. When you book your flight ticket online, remember that the final price must be clearly indicated on the first page.

5. When you check in at the airport, only take small quantities of liquids in your hand luggage (a maximum of 100 millilitres is permitted per container, which includes creams, powder and mousse). The total amount of liquids per person cannot exceed one litre.

6. If you are planning to travel by aeroplane outside Europe, check the black list of airlines banned in the European Union before buying your ticket.

7. If you are a passenger with disabilities or reduced mobility, you will be granted non discriminatory access conditions if you decide to travel by air or by cross-border train within the European Union. You have the right to free assistance before, during and after the flight, when travelling by air; to free assistance at the station and on board, when travelling by train. Inform your air carrier at least 48 hours in advance if you require such assistance.

8. When you travel by cross-border train within the European Union you are entitled to reimbursement (or rerouting) and compensation, plus assistance, in case of cancellation or delay at departure or at arrival of more than 1 hour. You will also enjoy adequate information before and during the journey.

9. If your luggage gets damaged during cross-border rail travel within the European Union, you are entitled to compensation of up to €1300. In case of accidents during the journey, you are entitled to advance payments and compensation for you or for your family.

10. If you are not satisfied with your cross-border rail journey within the European Union, keep in mind that each railway company has to communicate you the contact detail of the complaint handling body, which will answer to your complaint within one month.

11. When you buy a travel package, always make sure that both the price and all relevant information are clearly indicated.

12. Keep in mind that one out of four road accidents can be attributed to excessive alcohol or drug consumption. Don’t drive if you are under the influence of alcohol or drugs!

What’s going on

The member of the team here that deals with regional issues has just come back from a couple of days in Northern England, talking to regional press and other media actors about what they need from us and what is of interest to them. One interesting point that came up was that journalists wanted to know what was being written about elsewhere in Europe. Since I moved back from Brussels, I haven’t had the overview of Europe’s press that I had there, but there are a couple of useful websites for those that would like a more Europe-wide perspective on the media.

The first is Presseurop. Their approach seems to be briefs on a particular issue, pulling together the approach from across Europe, and highlighting the main trends of comment. They link to the principal articles quoted. Certainly worth checking out. And if you’re on Twitter, they are worth a follow (@presseurop) – it’s a real person tweeting, complete with cheeky comments, rather than a feed.

The second, recommended to me by the excellent Jon Worth, is Eurotopics. They do a daily press review drawing on sources from across Europe. Rather than a precis by topic, they do English- (and other-) language summaries of articles, which opens up sources of comment and analysis that would otherwise be closed off for linguistic reasons.

Are there others? It would be good to hear about them if there are.

Looking at the figures

We had a press briefing this morning with Eurostat, the European Commission’s statistical office. They were here to talk interested journalists through their new website. Over my years as a Spokeswoman I had the misfortune to talk journalists through the old version so was really impressed by the new site, which is much more user-friendly.

Particularly interesting were:

the country profile section, where you can set up custom tables, comparing one country with another, or with the average, or other parameters;

the structural indicators, which groups together those statistics that are most important for EU policy development – where there are targets agreed at EU level, for example.

the statistics database. Here there are main tables, where certain sets of data are already set up as tables, graphs and maps, but the user can cutomise the settings to get the graph s/he wants, or simply download the data to produce her/his own representations. Or if there’s a specific data set the user wants, s/he can use the database to create it.

You can register to get regular updates whenever new stats are put up on the site in a particular policy area, as well as a RSS feed for the news releases.

At all bits of the site, there is information about the methodology used, which is important from our point of view to make sure we are comparing apples and apples. There are still some differences in how statistics are presented, with governments presenting some at national level with slightly different methodology, usually for historical reasons, but also because of things such as a different financial year. So being open about our methodology allows proper comparison.

It might all seem a bit geeky, but I think it’s really important that there is a good statistical site to allow credible comparison at EU level. And I think Eurostat have managed to do so very well, steering a difficult course between being accessible to the ordinary person, and at the same time useful for experts.

Thank you

I was at the Foreign Press Association media awards last night. The FPA is the organisation for all non-UK journalists working in the UK, and has been around since 1888 (same as Celtic Football Club…) which makes it the oldest such organisation in the world, they say. The awards recognised excellence in UK foreign reporting as well as the best reporting done by FPA members. As media outlets cut staff, this office’s role in liaising with press from around the world, not just the UK, becomes ever more important, as staff will often get cut from Brussels before London. Talking to people last night I realised that it has become a small but significant part of what we do.

 There were some really interesting issues among the prize-winners, including corruption in WFP deliveries in Somalia and abuse of women in Chechnya. The overall winner was Martin Hickman of the Independent writing about palm oil. I’ve sat on juries giving two journalism prizes this year and in both instances they were given to journalists writing for the Independent. Martin won last night. This does beg the question: where is the Independent going wrong? It clearly has journalists of quality, writing on issues of interest and merit. So why does it have the biggest losses in readership of any newspaper? Answers on a postcard.

The keynote speech was given by Prince Felipe of Asturias, the Crown Prince of Spain. He highlighted the intricacies of the UK/Spanish relationship. I have to say that I did not know that Spanish companies invest more in the UK than in the whole of Latin America. He said that Spanish is the third language of the internet (not a huge surprise) but what was surprising was that in terms of number of pages (not users) the second language is…German!

Doing the funky chicken

I’m a bit perplexed by the stories today about Viscountess Dilhorne, who was visited by Defra inspectors to look at her 29 laying hens for compliance with the EC Laying Hens Directive. Our Directive only applies if you have more than 350 hens, exactly to avoid this sort of thing. But these are minimum standards, and individual Member States can go further. I contacted Defra, but not having heard back, checked out the UK regulations myself, in case it was a classic case of “gold-plating”. And from what I can tell, they take the EU minimum of 350 hens. So why this lady had a visit from the Defra inspectors (and let’s be clear, all compliance, checks etc are done by the countries’ own services) is beyond me. But it certainly isn’t something required by the Directive.

Court of Auditors

After today’s Court of Auditor’s report, Open Europe have done another of their lists of “EU waste”: http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/top50waste.pdf

Here’s a comment we have posted on their blog:

Indeed, here we go again. Open Europe’s “research” of 50 examples of EU ‘fraud and waste’ is a compilation of excerpts from EU project descriptions published by the EU, but then presented out of their context by Open Europe in a populist manner. However, the list has nothing to do with the findings of the Court of Auditors (but has already been misinterpreted as such e.g. by Mail Online). The reader concerned about the state of EU finances after reading Open Europe’s piece should rest assured: the 2008 EU accounts were signed off and the majority of EU payments were found to be correct.Why not check for yourself what the Court says at http://eca.europa.eu/portal/pls/portal/docs/1/3260294.PDF

Here’s some other coverage:

Auditors: EU budget spending improving [BusinessWeek.com]
EU auditors say management of the 27-nation bloc’s multibillion-euro (dollar) budget is improving. The EU’s Court of Auditors says, however, there are still too many errors in some programs.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9BSK7B80.htm

Budget errors falling [EuropeanVoice.com]
EU auditors find that level of incorrect payments is particularly high in regional support programme.
http://www.europeanvoice.com/current/article/2009/11/budget-errors-falling/66379.aspx

And for all you ever wanted to know about the EU budget (e.g. the difference between errors and fraud): http://ec.europa.eu/budget/library/publications/financial_pub/pub_eu_spending_en.pdf

Domino dancing

You might have heard about the dominoes that will be toppled this evening in Berlin, which have been painted by schools. You may NOT know that one of them is from a UK school, Chosen Hill in Gloucestershire, and photos are showing that their domino is right by the Brandenburg Gate. If you click here, it’s the 5th photo down on the left, and their domino is a black wall with a red tree on it. Congrats to Chosen Hill.

20 years ago I was an au pair, living and working in Frankfurt in Germany. I had had the chance to go to Berlin, but in August 1989, when I made my choice, Berlin seemed to be a divided city, with no prospect of being otherwise in my lifetime. It’s so astonishing, even now, that just 3 short months after my arrival it was all so different. I was doing my homework in my room when Ute, my au-pair mother, came down with a glass of bubbly telling me to come upstairs and watch the television as the Wall had been opened. A few weeks later we packed all the kids into the car and drove to Erfurt in the GDR. I remember eating Gulaschsuppe in the visitors cafe at the Wartburg for a few Ostmarks. And everyone tooted when they saw a Trabi on the West German roads. I was amazingly fortunate to have had such a direct connection with the events of that year, actually living in Germany.

Last week I attended an event at the London School of Economics entitled “20 years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain: have our dreams come true” with some of the major personalities from that time, including Vaclav Havel. You can listen/watch the event from the site. What I found interesting was the fact that unanimously they felt that yes, their dreams had come true, and that many of them articulated that through their involvement in the European Union.

I think that those who see the European Union as a purely federalist project bent upon the creation of a super-state are stuck in the pre-Wall past. The collapse of the Iron Curtain changed the terms of the game.

Sarkozy’s shower

There are various media reports today that EU taxpayers have paid £160m for the French Presidency, including £250,000 for a shower. EU presidencies are paid for by the country that runs them, with the exception of *some* of the costs of the summit(s) held in Brussels. So while I understand there has been considerable criticism within France, and it is a report of the French court of auditors that has led to this story, this is an issue for French taxpayers – the EU budget didn’t contribute directly to the Presidency and its events, and certainly wouldn’t have paid for a shower at the Elysée Palace.

Ben

Was at a great event last night – a debate between Science Minister Lord Drayson and Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science fame, at the Royal Institution. The Times Higher carried it as a webcast and it should be online for a while. It was great for several reasons:

Firstly, it was about  the quality of science reporting, an issues I’ve had an interest in since 2004 and which was an important part of my Eisenhower Fellowship. I think both made some good valid points and both didn’t. The problem was that they were talking about apples and oranges. The debate came about as a result of comments that Lord Drayson made about British science reporting being the best in the world, which Ben Goldacre challenged him on. But when the minister starts by saying “I’m of course talking about specialist science reporting” that does kind of change the remit of the debate, because Ben’s point about the problems of reporting science issues is that it isn’t always the science people doing it. There was a very (ahem) spirited defence from Fiona Fox of the Science Media Centre at the Royal Institution, and the audience certainly had some distinguished science writers there (I spotted Clive Cookson of the FT and Simon Singh was pointed out at one point). But that isn’t really where the problem (such as it is) lies.

The second fascinating issue was that this was the first truly social media event I have ever been at. The challenge to hold the debate was issued over Twitter. I, like others, heard about it through Ben’s twitter feed, and tickets sold out in 90 minutes (“the science equivalent of a Take That concert” according to Simon Mayo who was really good in the chair). So many people were tweeting about it that it (#scidebate) trended as a twitter topic (leading to a deluge of spammy tweets!).

The third issue for me was for most of the debate, you could have taken the word science, replaced it with Europe and the arguments would have been the same. But would we ever sell the tickets in 90 minutes?!

Anyway, if you are in anyway interested in science reporting, or social media as a communication tool, I recommend looking more closely at the event.

The Tweety Song

I’m a big fan of Twitter. As you’ll have seen from the feed alongside, while I wasn’t writing the blog very often, I was still Tweeting. There’s been a lot of introspection about it recently, with blogposts like this one.

My gut feeling is that asking if the Commission should Twitter is as daft as asking whether it should use the phone or write. Twitter is a means of communication, not an end in itself. What the Commission, like any organisation, has to consider is HOW it uses it. One of the basic rules about communication is identifying who you want to talk to and how do you best talk to them. Twitter is just part of that. Here’s some advice I gave to one of my colleagues in the Commission who is considering using Twitter.

With Twitter you a) talk to  a self-selecting audience and b) have to be pithy. For those reasons it’s got an edge over a website. Plus you can, maybe even have to, be a bit more personal – if you look at even the very official ones (Parliament, Conservatives, Lib Dems) there’s a personal tone. So I would say it’s best to have  just one or two people who are really up for doing it. It’s the most interactive of all the social media and it needs upkeep and someone who finds it useful and sees the value in it.

I find it good more for what I learn (breaking news, good EU gossip) than what people get from me. It has helped me find quite a lot of people interested in EU issues. Reading Jon Bernstein, that’s true for people at the other end of the news telescope. I’d be interested to know what you think.