Graham's blog entry Sunday 14th October

Published on Mon 15th Oct 2007

I normally pen this newsletter on my flight home from Brussels, but a propitious chance which seated me next to a senior official of the European Commission (whose mother lives in Somerset) on Friday's flight disrupted my normal schedule; and a LibDem supper in Calne later that evening, followed by a full day of commitments on Saturday, have delayed my reporting until today.

Probably the most important EU development of the week - certainly, as far as my South West England and Gibraltar constituency is concerned - was the adoption by the European Commission at its regular Wednesday meeting of a proposal for an integrated EU maritime policy. With 90% of our oceanic trade and 40% of our internal trade conducted by sea; with 70,000 kilometres of coastline and 40% of the world's merchant fleet; and with resources of oil and gas and fish and leisure opportunities provided by our seas, an integrated approach to the challenges of sustainable resource use, environmental protection and maritime safety is essential. The proposals include the setting up of a maritime surveillance network; maritime planning and integrated coastal zone management and the setting up of an observation and data network to improve knowledge and boost innovation. They will now come to Parliament and the Council of Ministers for our consideration.

My week started and ended with meetings in the two countries where Liberal Democrats and Socialists are merging into a single party: Italy and Poland. As I write, the Italian Partito Democratico is being born in Italy. My meetings on Sunday night and Monday were related to this. On Thursday night I flew to Wroclaw to address an election rally of the LiD ('Left and the

Democrats') party which I hope will do well enough in their 21st October General Election to unseat one of the Kaczynski brothers (the Prime Minister). In both countries the Socialists have recognised there is no future in arguing for a Socialist model of economic policy. (Arguably, the UK Labour Government's budget this week was also a recognition of this.) They cannot bring themselves to call their party Liberal, but in reality it is they who are joining us. Could it happen on a wider basis? Could EU countries develop an equivalent to the US Democratic Party, uniting progressive forces? I am sceptical on the matter, not least because Socialists are sometimes illiberal; but not of closed mind.

In between, I was concerned mainly with two rocks in the Mediterranean. I spent Monday evening and Tuesday in Valetta, Malta for meetings with government and opposition leaders. I've not visited the island in 44 years, since I lived there for fifteen months as a six and seven year old while my RN officer father was on Mediterranean patrol. I managed a brief visit to the house we lived in and the bay where I learned to swim, but most of my time was spent in discussion about Malta's potential in building understanding between the EU and North Africa, the challenges of migration across the Mediterranean and the hunting of migratory birds, on which I left Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi in no doubt about the strength of feeling of my constituents. And I followed with great interest Thursday's General election in Gibraltar, where the Gibraltar Liberal Party gained an extra seat in the House of Assembly (up from two to three, with the addition of 29 year old lawyer Neil Costa to their ranks) but saw their alliance with Labour fail by a tantalising 772 votes to unseat the Conservative government.

Back in Brussels on Wednesday I met Somerset County Councillors in the morning and Cornwall County Councillors in the afternoon to discuss EU funded projects in the two counties and fitted in a speech to the House in the debate to prepare next weekend's EU summit. I also hosted a lunch and a meeting with Hong Kong's Democratic Party leader Martin Lee and colleagues, who continue to struggle bravely against overwhelming pressure from the People's Republic of China to undermine freedom and the chances of real democracy in Hong Kong. I greeted policy advisers from our LD groups in national parliaments, who we'd brought together to prepare the 2009 European election campaign, and MPs from the national parliaments who follow the EU constitutional process. Sometimes my days are carpeted with wall-to-wall meetings, 8 am to

8 pm, and end only two and a half or three hours later after an official dinner. But they're never dull.

We're winning, too. As a result of Liberal Democrat campaigning, the EU Presidency used the fifth annual world day against the death penalty to proclaim the EU's commitment to work for abolition of the death penalty worldwide and announced that the EU will present a motion for a resolution at the UN General Assembly in New York for a worldwide moratorium on its use. And MEPs observed a minute's silence in tribute to the victims of the death penalty, with our President subsequently stating that we should use next year's Olympic Games 'to break the wall of silence which China is hiding behind'.

Next week I spend Monday in my constituency and speak to Bath University Lib Dem students in the evening, Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels and Thursday and Friday at the ELDR Congress in Berlin.