Graham's blog entry 9th March 2007

Published on Fri 9th Mar 2007

The European Commission naturally maintains a small representative office in the capital city of each of its member states. So too does the European Parliament, to keep in touch with national parliaments. But as the number of member states has grown and the costs of office property have increased we have sought to contain costs by co-locating the offices of the two institutions. Thus on Wednesday I was shown around a building in Tothill Street, London SW1 (currently bring renovated) by the head of the European Parliament's office in the UK. If all goes to plan it will house an EU information centre and the offices of Commission and Parliament by the middle of next year, even giving our MEPs a desk and a telephone they can use when in London.

My week started however with a visit to Bulgaria for private meetings with the leaders of our respective parties there, to try to engineer a rapprochement between them. The falling out which led to my cancelling this week's meeting of my Group in Sofia (see last week's newsletter)

appears to have been contained and will not rock the governing coalition of which they are both members. I also met the Prime Minister, who leads the Socialists (the largest party in the coalition), and who I like very much. He's only 40 but is bright and hard working and is doing his best to modernise both his party and his country.

Back in Brussels that evening I prepared for the meetings of my Group on Tuesday and Wednesday and the EU summit on Thursday and Friday. The summit is discussing economic growth and competitiveness but has been dominated by a discussion of how to react to climate change. The heads of state and government decided to go for a 20% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, some way short of the 30% cut scientists tell us we need. It is disappointing and means we'll have to make deeper cuts in future years, possibly under pressure from a graver climate crisis. However they also agreed to set a binding target of 20% content of renewable energy in the energy we consume; despite the fact that Jacques Chirac, attending his last EU Council meeting as President of France, put the seal on his miserable record by suggesting that nuclear energy should be considered a renewable energy resource! (I tipped off readers a couple of weeks ago about Francois Bayrou, our Liberal candidate to succeed Chirac. He is now up to 24% in the opinion polls and breathing down the necks of the two major parties' candidates, Sarkozy and Royal. We received him at the LD Prime Ministers lunch just before the summit started, to wish him well.)

I backed a move yesterday to have a statement in parliament next week on the management fiasco at Airbus. My Group generally opposes moves to politicise business decisions, but in this case it is so tied up with politics one cannot credibly avoid it. Airbus has posted a loss this year after a number of years of success in which at one point it outsold even Boeing. Job cuts have followed and with so many job losses at Filton I have a vital constituency interest in Airbus' success.

South West regional bosses were in Brussels this week to attend the 'Regions for Economic Change' conference and lobby for EU funding for the regeneration of the Redruth-Pool-Camborne area of Cornwall. Tory MEP Caroline Jackson and I met them on Wednesday night (in my case hot and bothered after a delayed flight back from my meetings that afternoon in London). The region is now working well in and with Brussels and is getting good value for my constituents out of our EU membership.

With Thursday being International Women's Day the European Parliament became the focus of some journalists' attention, in particular about how many of our MEPs are women. At 30% we fare rather better than Westminster, but it was pointed out that Caroline Jackson, soon to retire, is the only woman out of 27 UK Tory MEPs. I am pleased to say that 58% of the UK LibDem MEP contingent is of the fairer gender, or 7 out of 12 MEPs. It is one of the best records of any national party delegation in the whole European Parliament.

Next week we'll be in Strasbourg for a week of formal debates and votes. I've had to turn down an invitation from the President of the Commission to join him at Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play an all-star continental side on Tuesday night, because my Group's agenda is heavily charged. Shucks!

This afternoon I've been in Cardiff at a UK Citizens' Forum on the EU and took the opportunity to have lunch with our leader in the Welsh Assembly, Mike German. Tomorrow I'll be in Chard for a meeting of Project Romania, a charity of which I'm a patron, and later in Belstone, near Okehampton in Devon, for a Pizza and Politics evening at which Rita is cooking and I'll be producing hot air in other ways.