Graham's blog entry Friday 9 November 2007

Published on Fri 9th Nov 2007

I celebrated my return from a week's break with three five a.m. starts: Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Travelling to Brussels on Sunday evening allowed me to catch an early flight to Bucharest on Monday to lecture at two universities there. I had accepted the invitations on a date to coincide with the campaign for country's first elections to the European Parliament, allowing me to make a call to arms to five hundred young people with two of our euro-candidates in tow (to whom I was able to direct some of the questions, to give them a platform).

Being in government and half way through a parliament, Romanian Liberals are far less popular than at the last general election; but with about 14% in the opinion polls they should return us three or four MEPs.

My visit coincided with a backlash in Italy against Romanian immigrants, following the murder of an Italian woman by a Romany. Prodi's government published a hastily drafted bill to make it easier to expel immigrants involved in crime, but this probably only made matters worse. I was able at least to remind people that a generation or two ago, before the EU, the matter might have led to a pogrom against Romanians in Italy: now, the EU's legal framework and the daily co-operation between our member states prevents this. On Wednesday the Romanian prime minister, Calin Tariceanu, went to Italy to meet Prodi in a joint move to calm things down. On Monday afternoon in Strasbourg we'll have a statement to Parliament by Commissioner Frattini and a debate.

Back in Brussels on Tuesday I chaired the meeting of my Group to discuss next week's Strasbourg agenda. Since there's not a huge amount of controversial business, we used the occasion of our Group meeting to hear from Mariann Fischer-Boel, the Commissioner for Agriculture (Danish Lib Dem). Among the issues she covered is one causing great angst in Germany and elsewhere, which is a decision not to allow fruit wines to be called wines. This has the German apple wine producers up in arms. They barracked the President of Parliament when he attended a meeting in Frankfurt. As a result of their protests the decision will almost certainly be reversed.

My efforts to fight the same corner for cider brandy are proving less fruitful, if you'll excuse the pun. The Commission proposed that cider brandy be a recognised name, to clear up some uncertainty in the previous 1989 law. But national governments meeting in the Council of Ministers disagreed and dropped it. (My local MP sadly failed to check the facts before writing his column in the Western Gazette and blamed the Commission.) It went unnoticed in Parliament and the legislation was adopted at first reading, so I'm fighting a rearguard action. Most infuriatingly, our own government ministers are not prepared to make an issue of it. I had three meetings this week and will have more next in my fight to preserve the west country spirit.

I was pleased to welcome to Parliament this week Mark Hawkins, managing director of Four Plus Two, a Plymouth based company which has won the contract to design and supply much of Parliament's new web-based TV broadcasting. The new 'europarl tv' channel is expected to be up and running by April of next year, broadcasting live and archived coverage of Parliament's proceedings, though I imagine my kids will still choose to watch their favourite soap opera: 'Friends'.

On Wednesday I hosted a conference on weapons in space which brought together national legislators from Europe, North America and Africa. We had fascinating presentations by experts about the impact of the militarisation of space. With low orbit space less than 150km from the earth's surface, the prospect of weapons being deployed from space is frightening and no longer science fiction. Proceedings of the conference will soon be viewable on www.e-parl.net.

That evening I hosted an exhibition of photographs from the archives of Turkey's 'Zaman' newspaper. Like The Independent, Zaman was launched twenty years ago and has become the major Liberal newspaper in Turkey. On the day after the European Commission published its progress report on Turkey's progress towards joining the EU I managed to bring together the President of Parliament, Turkey's Minister for the Economy and EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn (Finland, Lib Dem) in a celebration of how far Turkey has progressed in recent years.

Yesterday morning I found myself next to Hungary's Minister for the Economy (and Liberal Democrat party leader) Janos Koka on the red-eye flight to Budapest. He had been in Brussels for meetings. We were both due in Budapest to address a conference on Liberalism in the 21st Century. Helpfully, we were able to co-ordinate our approaches to give that impression of effortless unity at which Liberal Democrats excel.

Today I speak to pupils at Ridgeway School in Wroughton, Wiltshire. Next I meet the new Chief Executive of Bristol Airport. I then go to the Sir John Colfox School in Bridport to monitor progress in my Broadening Horizons (chinese language teaching) scheme and finally speak to Lib Dems in Exeter. On Saturday I shall be in London for the counting of the votes in a ballot to determine the party's list of candidates for the 2009 EP elections.