The wedding planner

 

Hello, Sarah Rappaport, your luxury reporter in London here. I’m back at my desk in the newsroom after getting married abroad in Greece at Island Resort Athens Riviera. With the Aegean Sea as our backdrop, we said our vows in front of 61 of our closest friends and family, with our first dance to Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” At midnight, chicken gyros were brought out to keep the party going—and it kept going until 4 a.m.  People are likely to throw rose petals at you only once in your life. Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography It was even better than I had hoped. Sometimes life can outdo your imagination, and I hadn’t known quite how it’d feel to have people I’ve loved from all parts of my life together in the same space. Why Greece? It’s been a favorite vacation destination of mine for some time, for the sun, sea, hospitality, culture and incredible food. Dan and I had also been there several times on trips together, and we said to each other before we got engaged that we’d love to get married in our favorite vacation spot.   Still, throwing a big party in a foreign country has its own challenges, especially in a country where I can’t speak the language and have only visited as a tourist. So as someone who has recently graduated from wedding planning, here are some tips on how to have a destination wedding—or really any wedding—without losing your mind, just in case you or someone you know is considering tying the knot abroad. This is what the view at Island Resort Athens Riviera looks like. (It’s not AI.)  Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography Get Local Help I’m extremely organized and love a spreadsheet. Still, I couldn’t have planned a wedding abroad and still managed to have a job, a healthy social life and relationship, and the occasional gym session. You’ll want to have local help too. I hired an Athens-based wedding planner, Rena & Co., and Rena Tzevelekou was invaluable in both making everything run smoothly on the day and bringing my ideas to life. She has relationships with local vendors such as florists and makeup artists, so I didn’t have to spend hours on Google Reviews trying to line people up for my date, and the ones we picked more than delivered.  My planner was also full of ideas that referenced the destination. One of them was having an olive bar during cocktail hour with different types of local olives and olive oils for guests to try. At dinner, there were tiny bottles of extra virgin olive oil for guests to take home as gifts.  Little gifts for guests. Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography Trust Your Instincts When It Comes to the Budget We wanted to wow our guests with the views at our venue and have a generous buffet of Greek food, so that’s what we invested large parts of the budget on. Also, I have a big sweet tooth (if you’re in London, I put that to work finding the best bakeries a few years ago!) and wanted a showpiece dessert, so we spent a bit more to have a giant pavlova that we decorated in front of our guests in lieu of a more traditional wedding cake. People are still talking to me about my giant pavlova, so that expense was more than worth it. What I think wasn’t worth it was the pair of sky-blue Jimmy Choos that I splurged on. They looked gorgeous in photos, but I struggled to walk and dance in them, and they got swapped for a pair of sandals within an hour. I am one of the many people who stopped wearing heels during the pandemic and never got back into it, so I don’t know why I deluded myself into thinking I’d be a different person on my wedding day.  Also, stay off TikTok. Influencer Becca Bloom (aka “the Queen of RichTok”) got married a few weeks before I did, and we have wildly different budgets—I’m a journalist and not the queen of anything. I was wondering if I could get rainbow fireworks like she did for her Lake Como wedding. I didn’t end up paying for any fireworks. The wedding was still great.  Accept That Not Everyone Will Make It  The trade-off of having a wedding abroad is that people you thought would make it can’t come, whether because of distance, not having enough vacation days, budget concerns or general unwillingness to travel.  In some ways, any wedding I had would have been a destination wedding because I’m from Chicago, my husband is from Wales, and we live in London, but skipping the places we’re from and planning a destination wedding somewhere else entirely did mean that not everyone we wanted to attend could end up coming. Have you ever seen anyone happier about a giant dessert? Photographer: Tonia & Theodore Photography Make Sure Everyone Knows the Rules I travel regularly, but that’s not the case for all of our friends and family. A few months ago, my father-in-law discovered that his passport would expire a few weeks after our wedding in September. I had to work to convince him that he couldn’t travel abroad on it, despite the fact that it was still technically valid.  That applies to the actual wedding paperwork too. We found out pretty quickly that it’d be a lot more work to get legally wed in Greece, so we booked a town hall ceremony in London a few days prior. In a small way, it took some of the pressure off, since we were already wed in the eyes of the British government. Too late for cold feet! Roll With the Punches A lot of my vendors wanted payments in cash, which meant transporting thousands of euros through Heathrow Airport. I almost never use cash in my day-to-day London life—I’d say 99% of my transactions are via Apple Pay—so withdrawing large amounts, let alone traveling with it, was nerve-wracking.  I also had a last-minute addition of a few guests whose RSVPs didn’t come through, which meant last-minute table shuffling. At the time this felt extremely taxing, but I was glad for the extra guests in the end.  I’m manning up for those thank you notes: Hand-writing letters and cards is more important than ever. Source: Montblanc Accept that you can’t control everything! I recommended my brother visit Paros (one of our Where to Go 2025 ideas!) after the wedding, and he had a wonderful time. That said, he got stuck on the island for an extra day because of a high-wind sailing ban on the Aegean and missed his flight back to Chicago, despite building an extra day into his schedule. Travel mishaps can happen even to the best of planners. Throw a major life event and party on top of that, and there’s so many plates spinning in the air. But it was all fine! Enjoy the process, and take a minute to enjoy yourself with your new spouse. We had a sweetheart table, and before dinner I stared at my family from Chicago and New York, as well as friends from every part of my life, from my childhood to my 20s and early 30s in London, and I felt so loved. It was all worth it in that moment!

An Antisemitic Horror in Manchester | Today on EuroCon

 

An Antisemitic Horror in Manchester | Today on EuroCon

Friday 3 October Driving the day...  Yesterday morning, Jews in Manchester were gathering to mark Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, that peace was shattered when a car drove into the crowd. A man—later identified by police as Jihad Al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent—emerged from the vehicle and continued his attack, resulting in two Jewish men being killed, and three more people being seriously injured. Al-Shamie also attempted to smash his way through the windows of the synagogue, before he was shot dead by police.  That such a brutal, blatantly antisemitic attack could take place on British soil, in 2025, is shameful. But it is also, unfortunately, not much of a surprise. As Frank Haviland writes on europeanconservative.com today, Keir Starmer’s government has repeatedly chosen to appease radical Muslims over protecting Jews, time and again.  Since Hamas’s massacre on October 7th 2023, anti-Jewish acts have skyrocketed in the UK. Emboldened by the anti-Israel hatred we see on our streets practically every weekend, antisemites have taken pro-Palestine activism as an excuse to unleash their vile bigotry against British Jews. Demonstrators have been allowed to chant antisemitic slogans during protests, display hateful placards, and intimidate law-abiding Jews with little or no consequence.  How many more Jews have to die before the British state realises it has been enabling the very climate that endangers them?   By Lauren Smith

COMMENTARY Starmer Chose Islam Over Britain and Now We See the Consequences FRANK HAVILAND  The bodies of the slain are not even cold, and yet the pro-Palestine brigade are on the streets of Britain, celebrating their deaths. Read more...

IN OTHER NEWS...

IN OTHER NEWS... AfD Slams ‘Migrant Money’ as Foreign Welfare Claims Soar ZOLTÁN KOTTÁSZ Government data reveals a 43% jump in foreigners on so-called Bürgergeld without work history Read more... King Lear at the UN: The Tragedy of the Recognition of Palestine TIAGO MOREIRA DE SÁ The blood of innocents cannot be the legitimate currency of international consecration. Read more... Outrage as Pro-Palestine Marchers Rally Hours After Synagogue Murders TEC NEWS While Manchester’s Jewish community mourned its dead, marchers shouted “death to the IDF” in UK cities. Read more... Greta’s Latest Flotilla Was Just As Cringe As The Last LAUREN SMITH This kind of performative pro-Palestine activism is fuelled by virtue-signalling narcissism. Read more... > CLICK HERE TO EXPLORE MORE CONTENT The Forge with Harrison Pitt | Ep. 13: Britain’s Big Islam Gamble | Michael Gove In this episode, Harrison pays a visit to the former Conservative politician Michael Gove, now the editor of The Spectator, at the magazine’s Old Queen Street office. They joust over the Tories’ track record in government, the threat posed to the West by Islam’s demographic expansion, and whether Kemi Badenoch should make way for Rupert Lowe to lead the Conservative Party. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL > Did you receive this from a friend? Click here to subscribe to our newsletter!

Growth in Europe: The Politics of Permission

 

Fixing Economic Growth in Europe: The Politics of Permission

Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The next growth story will belong to places that excel at the basics: abundant energy, flexible work, simple and stable rules, openness to trade and investment.

• Shanker Singham
• — October 1, 2025

Shanker Singham is the chairman of the Growth Commission and a former advisor to the UK Secretary of State and U.S. Trade Representative.

• Tags: competitiveness, employment policy, energy policy, EU regulations, Growth Commission, Shanker Singham, subsidiarity, 

icture a talented twenty-something engineer in Lyon or Łódź. She’s fluent in code and robotics, she wants to join a company that makes real things, and she would prefer to do it at home rather than in Austin, Seoul, or Bangalore. What stops her? It isn’t a lack of ambition or skills. It is the accumulation of frictions that make it harder to build in Europe than to dream in Europe: electricity that costs too much and arrives too slowly, rules that read like defensive fortifications rather than invitations, capital that prefers real estate to machinery.

That accumulation of frictions is what our Growth Commission calls anti-competitive market distortions—ACMDs. The name is technical; the reality is not. If you’re a homeowner, an ACMD is the reason your electricity bill spikes while your salary doesn’t. If you run a mid-sized firm, it is the extra quarter you add to a lead time because permits take too long and standards shift mid-project. If you’re young, it is the sense that the best opportunities sit a flight away. ACMDs are the quiet tax on trying.

Europe’s problem is not a shortage of ideas or of engineers. It is a shortage of permission. For three decades, we told ourselves that a high-cost, high-rule, high-centralisation model could be made compatible with fast growth so long as the world stayed calm and capital stayed cheap. That world is gone. The next growth story will belong to places that excel at the basics: abundant energy, flexible work, simple and stable rules, openness to trade and investment. The question is whether Europe chooses to be one of them.

What would it take to write that story here? Not a silver bullet, but a compact—between national governments, firms, and cities—that swaps insulation for competition, and rhetoric for measurable progress. It rests on five switches we can flip and a way to track whether we actually did.

Switch one: energy realism. Industrial civilisation runs on density, reliability, and price. For Europe to make things at scale, power must be affordable and available when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Europe simply cannot afford its network of environmental restrictions and taxes imposed in pursuit of elusive Net Zero goals. Instead, we need to reduce these distortions and generate far more energy in all its forms, especially baseload. France certainly has an advantage here on nuclear, but nuclear alone is not enough in today’s AI powered world.

Switch two: work unlocked. The purpose of labour law is to protect citizens, not immobilise them. What makes it hard to fire a worker, makes it hard to hire them. At a time when AI is taking jobs, the premium on being able to hire the best workers possible is very high. When it is risky to hire and costly to adjust, firms invest in software instead of people; when transitions are punishing, workers cling to positions rather than pursue better matches. Countries that converted protection of posts into protection of people—through portable benefits, learning accounts, and simple hiring and separation rules—raised participation and pulled the inactive into work. Do that at scale, and wages rise with productivity rather than through decrees that price out the least experienced.

Switch three: a regulatory reset. The original European single market in goods was based on mutual recognition—compete on performance, not paperwork. Over time, it has drifted into regulatory harmonisation and a compliance culture that rewards size and punishes entry. A reset begins with a presumption of openness: unless there is a compelling risk to safety or honesty, the default should be to let firms test, sell, and compete. Give every major regulation a sunset unless renewed, require impact reviews that count competitive effects, and publish the cost of delay alongside the cost of action.

Switch four: an outward-facing market strategy. In a weaponised world, it is tempting to turn inward. That reaction is understandable—and self-defeating. Europe’s prosperity depends on selling to the world and learning from it. Our trade policy should do fewer grand designs and more practical bridge-building: mutual recognition and equivalence with trusted partners, open services with data-trust frameworks, and a relentless attack on non-tariff barriers that lock our firms out of growth markets.

Switch five: subsidiarity for grown-ups. Many of Europe’s best reforms do not happen in national capitals; they are invented by cities and regions that own their problems. We need to make that competition explicit. Give mayors and regional councils room to try new combinations—planning rules that make housing buildable, transport that cuts commute times, vocational programmes that match local employers, procurement that pays for outcomes. The U.S.’s laboratory of fifty states has helped it reach growth-promoting outcomes. The EU should allow member states and subnational entities to compete in the same way.

Finance the buildout. None of the above happens at speed unless Europe rewires how it funds investment. We are not short of savings; we are short of channels that turn those savings into equity for firms that want to grow. Too much household wealth sits in bank deposits, life-insurance wrappers, and property; too little flows to productive risk. The fix is practical: full expensing for new capital for a defined period; simpler, lighter prospectuses for small public listings; pension rules that let long-term money hold long-term assets; and tax treatment that stops punishing equity relative to debt. A genuine single market for risk capital—with passports that actually work—would do more for Europe’s start-ups and scale-ups than a decade of slogans. Pair that with faster approvals for industrial zones with ready-to-build power and water, and watch private capital move.

These five switches change the weather. But compacts fail when they become talking points. So we should agree to measure the right things and publish the scoreboard. That is what our ACMD approach is for. Instead of arguing about ideologies, we track distortions that suppress competition and show their cost in living standards. You do not need to buy the technical machinery to see the common sense: reduce distortions in energy, domestic competition, international openness, and property rights, and economies deliver more. 

Europe has strengths: nuclear engineering; deep scientific networks; a fabric of small and mid-sized manufacturers; patient savings that could finance long-term investment if we gave savers a fair return; and a civilisation that values craft, quality, and local pride. None of what we are suggesting requires any of that to be altered.

There are objections to this agenda, and they deserve answers. Some say that pushing for competition will erode social protections. The truth is the opposite: you cannot defend a generous social model on a stagnant tax base. Growth is not a rival to solidarity; it is its precondition. Others argue that climate requires a planned economy. That confuses ends with means. It is economic growth that has led to better environmental outcomes around the world. Trying to pick technologies from the centre multiplies costs and delays the transition. A final objection is that Europe’s demographics doom us to slow growth. Demography matters, but participation, skills, and capital deepening matter more. Places that draw the inactive into work and invest in tools that raise productivity can grow even with flat populations.

Politics raises a final worry: can any of this be done without a bruising culture war? Yes—if we restore the distinction between goals we share and instruments we can argue about. Citizens want three basic things from economic policy: a fair shot at a good job; prices that don’t punish them for heating, moving, and eating; and public services that work. The compact speaks to those demands directly. Judge performance by connection times, business formation, take-home pay, and the cost and reliability of power.

What would an early-action plan look like? Within twelve months, governments could clear the queue of energy and grid investments with one-stop permitting and national targets for approvals; legislate full expensing for new private-sector investment for a time-limited window; cut employer charges on lower wages to pull people into work; write an ‘outcomes not inputs’ test into major regulations and do full competition impact assessments; and launch mutual recognition talks with key partners in services and digital trade. Regions could pilot fast-track zoning for ready-to-build industrial sites with guaranteed utilities. Universities and employers could co-fund modular training that delivers job-ready skills in months, not years.

If we do this well, Europe will feel different within a political cycle. Not because GDP statistics will sing instantly, but because people’s actual lives will change: a factory expands instead of deferring; an electrician starts a business and can hire two apprentices; a young engineer powers her robotics lab at a price that lets her compete; a family sees their energy bill stabilise and their commute shorten because housing was built closer to jobs. Growth stops being a debate on television and becomes the texture of everyday life.

It is easy to see the obstacles. It is also easy to underestimate Europe’s capacity to move when it decides to. We built a single market from a patchwork. We turned a continental grid into one of the world’s most reliable systems. We can now lead on a new standard: the easiest advanced economy in which to build. That title is up for grabs. Whoever wins it will not only grow faster; they will shape the technologies and business models the rest adopt.

The choice is not between Europe as a museum and Europe as cowboy capitalism it does not want. The real choice is between a politics of permission and a politics of possibility. The politics of permission makes every new thing climb an obstacle course designed for fear. The politics of possibility sets clear goals, rewards performance, and trusts citizens with more of their choices. The first path promises safety and delivers stagnation. The second accepts manageable risk and delivers renewal.

Our Commission will continue to measure distortions and publish the gains from removing them. But measurement is a means, not an end. The end is straightforward: energy that lets us build, work that pays, rules that welcome entrants, an outward stance that multiplies opportunity, and local freedoms that turn pride into projects. We know how to get there. What we require is not another round of slogans, but a compact among builders—public and private—who are ready to switch the system on.

Europe’s next growth story can be written at home. Let’s give our engineer a reason to stay.