Graham's blog entry 18th May 2007

Published on Fri 18th May 2007

My week started in Bulgaria, where I spent Saturday and Sunday campaigning with our two Liberal parties in the campaign for the euro elections this coming Sunday. In Isperi I addressed 20,000 people at an open air rally organised by the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (I've previously only spoken to election rallies of that size in Senegal and Cambodia and was astonished to see it in Europe); and later in Stara Zagora I spoke at a much smaller rally for the National Movement Simeon II, our other sister party. The weather was glorious, the countryside and the women beautiful and the sense that our people are really campaigning hard was tangible.

US Secretary of State for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was in Brussels on Monday, having met the interior ministers of the self-styled G6 (the six largest EU countries: Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Poland) over the weekend. He addressed Parliament's Justice and Home Affairs Committee and then made himself available to the Party leaders. I found him gaunt, sharp, hard and extremely right wing. He and I are of the same generation; but our views on how to live in the world are far apart. For him, countries are either good or evil; and there's a war on terror which will be won or lost essentially with military and security tools. Maybe he would define me as a cheese-eating surrender monkey, but I don't see the world that way.

I was honoured on Tuesday to be the annual guest on Schoolnet, an online discussion in which children from 13 schools across the continent fired questions at me for an hour on all aspects of EU policy. Sadly, but as happens so often, the UK was notable for its absence.

I gave the opening addresses this week at conferences on Democracy in China and Asia, Biofuels and Giving Northern Cyprus a Voice. At the latter our main guest was Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, who I shall meet again on Friday on my first ever visit to the island. The Turkish Cypriots expected a lot from EU accession but have gained very little; their Greek compatriots block almost every measure to help them. There is now some trade across the Green Line: in honey, fish, potatoes and citrus fruits. The Committee on Missing Persons (presumed killed in hostilities) is making some progress. And movement around the island is easier. Nonetheless, we've a long way to go before Talat and Papadopoulos share smiles and sandwiches like Adams and Paisley at Stormont.

The way our governments cheat on development aid was exposed this week in a report by Concord, a group of development aid charities. They contest the claim that at 48 billion euros the level of development aid in the EU reached 0.42% of GDP last year. A number of governments, they point out, include in their figures debt cancellation, aid to refugees in Europe (including the cost of deporting them!) and the cost of educating foreign students in Europe: a total of 13.5 bn out of the EUR 48 bn. Their report can be found at

http://www.concordeurope.org/Public/Page.php?ID=4&language=eng

Some good news however is EU participation in a global project to create over the next ten years a species database, or world digital encyclopaedia, of all living species of flora and fauna. One report suggests this could eventually run to 300 million pages when all species' characteristics are included. Europe's part in this will build on the Fishbase database (http://www.fishbase.org/search.php) already up and running.

The European Commission agreed on Wednesday to recommend a new approach to getting the EU's Galileo satellite system up and running. Having failed to get industry to agree on funding the construction phase, the taxpayer will foot more of the cost of building it but in return will get a higher share of the profits once it's up and running. With Europe increasingly dependent on America's GPS system and the Chinese about to launch a competitor, we may need our own for security as well as for commercial benefits.

Next week Parliament meets in plenary session in Strasbourg to debate and vote on - inter alia - my colleague Emma Nicholson MEP's excellent report on Kashmir.