Graham's Blog Entry 18 January 2008

Published on Fri 18th Jan 2008

My first priority on arriving in Strasbourg on Monday was to call Ivars Godmanis, the new Latvian Prime Minister, whose taking office brings back to six the number of liberal Democrat PMs in the EU. He is a former professor of solid state physics who became his country's first prime minister after it threw off the shackles of Communism in 1990. In the meantime he has also served as finance minister and home affairs minister in coalition governments. I brought him up to date on co-operation in the higher echelons of the EU Liberal family and arranged to meet him during his forthcoming visit to Brussels.

Parliament's main item of legislative business this week was the Consumer Credit directive. This has been almost eight years in the making and the right-wing German 'rapporteur' (the person responsible for piloting it through parliament) tried to sabotage a deal at the last moment to please the German banks, who oppose it. The vast majority of MEPs decided, however, that people taking out cross-border hire purchase agreements or loans deserve the same level of information and protection as they would get in their own country, and the measure passed with a decent majority in favour.

Unfortunately the British UKIP MEPs decided to step up their tactics to obstruct Parliament's business by demanding a roll-call on every vote held this week. This process is normally reserved only for the tightest or most crucial votes. And since it costs an estimate three hundred pounds every time it is used (each member's vote has to be recorded, registered and the overall result published in each EU language), UKIP added at least twenty-five thousand pounds to the cost of EU business this week. It is their right to call for a roll-call vote, but I hope they will be challenged publicly on this appalling waste of taxpayer's money.

I raised in the House on Monday evening the Russian decision to close the offices of the British Council in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. The British Council is an educational and cultural arm of government which seeks to foster mutual understanding and creativity. Russia's move is simply a tit-for-tat action in a row over the UK's refusal to extradite a businessman who is sought on charges which many people believe to be trumped up (and who would almost certainly not be fairly tried in today's Russia). I would not normally raise in the European Parliament a matter affecting one member state only. But since the British Council operates in Russia on the basis of a legal agreement between the two countries - and since its closure is part of a pattern of measures against western European organisations there - I sought (and obtained) the intervention of Parliament's president with his Russian counterpart.

I took advantage too of the presence of EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou in Strasbourg to raise the cases of avian flu in Dorset in my constituency. Four swans found dead near Abbotsbury have been diagnosed as carrying the H5N1 virus. Though a vaccine has been developed with EU funding and though the virus has proven less easily transmissible to humans than at first feared, the threat to poultry is very real and I was pleased to have the Commissioner's assurance that they are monitoring the outbreak closely together with the UK government.

On Tuesday parliament received the Grand Mufti of Damascus in the first of a series of events to mark the EU's Year of Inter-Cultural Dialogue. His visit passed off without incident (apart from a hapless freelance interpreter allegedly rendering his title into English as 'the great muffin') but members of my Group were incensed when they discovered that the list of visiting dignitaries contained only religious leaders and that all are men. On Thursday I had to insist at the monthly agenda planning meeting that Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani woman intellectual, be added to the list of invitees.

On Wednesday morning Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa presented the programme of his government's six monthly presidency of the EU. Slovenia is the first of the former Communist countries to take on the rotating Presidency of the Council of Ministers. His proposals are good but unexceptional, his style modest but not lacking in ambition. In view of France's recent attempt to steal the limelight from Slovenia I felt obliged to point out in the debate that Europe's Davids often make better Presidents than its Goliaths.

This week I recorded my first ever 'videoblog', a brief face-to-camera report on the week's parliamentary highlights which I hope is already open to public view on my website, www.grahamwatsonmep.org.

Constituency activities this weekend include a visit to a company in Plymouth which has won the contract to televise the EP, joining Cotswold LibDems at a dinner with Charles Kennedy and speaking at the Cornwall LibDem conference in Bodmin.

I start next week with a day of meetings in London before using for the first time the new St Pancras terminal for the Eurostar train to Brussels.