The party's over

The Irish may still be celebrating but for the rest of us the party has to be over. We have a lot to do. The EU is not really in crisis and the Constitutional Reform Lisbon Treaty is not dead. It ought to be but it ain’t. Dracula will rise from the grave again. Now, that I think of it, he has not precisely gone to sleep either.

While each temporary set-back is to be celebrated as, eventually, they will add up to a grand crash, I am afraid I have not believed the hype since that first NO vote in Denmark in 1992. That is how long I have been in this business and many days it feels a lot longer. Especially when people around me hyperventilate.

This being so I have decided to open up a new front, one that I referred to briefly in the near-live blog we were running on the Irish referendum yesterday (mostly it was the boss who was running it but I chipped in occasionally). The new front is a new blog, to be run in parallel with EUReferendum, under the aegis of the Bruges Group, another string to my bow. Any minute now, I am told, the techno-staff will get his act together and put the blog on the Bruges Group website’s front page. In the meantime, people will have to go there directly.

The BrugesGroupBlog is not a replacement for EUReferendum (incidentally, we need to wait for developments before we do that final name-change), where I shall continue to blog as long as the boss allows me. The idea is to have a parallel blog to deal with similar though often slightly different themes in short postings with many links to other outlets, particularly in the blogosphere.

I shall, for the time being, reserve the longer and the much longer pieces for EUReferendum. The BrugesGroupBlog is an evolving idea and may turn into something very different as time goes on. Rather an attractive thought that.