Graham's blog entry 14th September 2007

Published on Fri 14th Sep 2007

While my constituents in Gibraltar celebrated their National Day, my week started in Budapest, which meant leaving home on Sunday afternoon. I met the Prime Minister, the leaders of the opposition parties and the Ministers who come from our LibDem sister party the Free Democrats. One of them, a 33 year old woman called Agnes Horvath, is Secretary of State for Health and is having to push through difficult reforms to the health insurance system without the clear support of her Socialist coalition partners. Hungary is in a precarious position, having postponed reforms in recent years and now lacking the political courage or the economic growth rates to allow it to make reforms on a number of fronts at the same time.

While I was in Budapest the EU completed negotiations on the text of a Stability and Association Agreement with Serbia. Signature depends on Serbia co-operating fully with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Could Serbia be fast-tracked into the EU in exchange for allowing independence to Kosovo? The Serbs say no, but it looks a likely trade-off. With an EU force set to take over peacekeeping duties in Kosovo from the UN before the end of the year it is becoming increasingly an EU challenge.

While our Justice and Home Affairs Committee voted to introduce common rules for the EU-27 on the return of migrants to their home countries, our Monetary Affairs Committee called in the Chairman of the European Central Bank and the two pertinent EU Commissioners to grill them about the wobble on the financial markets. Some on the left want new regulations for financial markets, but the majority believes better supervision of bank lending and of the credit rating agencies to be sufficient. (Standard and Poors were giving AAA+ ratings to US securitised mortgages packages, for example.) Contrary to some reports, the ECB stabilised the markets through short term loans (repayable with interest after 24 hours) to provide liquidity to the banking sector in general rather than individual bail outs; the Bank of England, which was more hesitant at first, ended up having to inject nearly six and a half billion pounds into the market yesterday as Northern Rock building society sought protection. My sense is that if the euro did not exist and 13 national central banks had each chosen their own policy, the resulting anarchy might have led to a serious crisis of confidence in financial institutions.

I escaped to London just after lunch on Thursday, arriving just in time for the launch of my Broadening Horizons scheme. This scheme has brought Chinese language teaching assistants into five schools in my constituency at no cost to the schools other than board and lodging. I met the five young ladies who will go respectively to Hayle School in Cornwall, Pilton Community College in Devon, the Sir John Colfox School in Dorset, Huish Episcopi School in Somerset and the Sir Bernard Lovell School in South Glos. It is the culmination of many months work and I was pleased to have with me to launch it the Taiwanese Minister of Education and Ben Bradshaw, UK Minister for the South West. MPs and councillors from the region were also present, along with representatives of the schools.

Today I joined them again at the British Council, who ran an induction day for the teachers, and managed to fit in a number of meetings with people at Party HQ before returning to meet constituents in the evening. Tomorrow I've no political engagements but on Sunday I'll be in Brighton at the LibDem Conference.