SOUTH
WEST FIRST
LETTER FROM STRASBOURG
February
2001
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
It had to
happen. Just when I was thinking that my travel arrangements for
getting to Strasbourg were going well.
My flight arrived at Stuttgart airport almost on time, so far so
good, but when I emerged into the arrivals hall, there was no driver to
be seen, nor any colleagues from other flights waiting for a driver to
take them/us to Strasbourg. Oh
dear, what could the matter be?
NO
TURNING BACK
A phone
call to the office in the Parliament elicits the unwelcome information
that both cars collecting MEPs have been and gone, are too far on the
way back to Strasbourg to turn back, it would take a couple of hours to
send another car and I would have to wait until the car collecting the
next batch of MEPs at 2.30 p.m. At
just past 11 a.m., having got up at 5.30 a.m. to get to the airport in
time for the 8 a.m. flight, this was not very welcome news!
INVOLVED
ITINERARY
I looked
into the option of going by train.
A helpful office at the airport gave me an itinerary which
involved going by metro to the main railway station, taking a train to
Karlsruhe, changing to a train to Offenburg and changing again for a
third train to Strasbourg, which should get me there after 3 p.m.
I felt cautious about making all the connections in time with my
virtually non-existent German, and opted to wait.
GALLIC
INDIFFERENCE
Next time
this happens, I shall be more adventurous.
In the end, we didn't leave the airport until nearly 3.30 p.m.
and reached Strasbourg at nearly 5.30 p.m.
The only redeeming feature was that I had time to catch up on my
reading. I later found out
from my Swedish colleagues that they had asked the (French) driver if
there was anyone else and he said no.
The shrugged shoulder brigade have caught up with me again, only
this time it was a French driver not Air France!
PENALTIES
OF THE JOB
Of course
these things happen from time to time, it goes with the job, one
develops a certain fatalism about it and it does give me the chance to
put a travel hard time story in this newsletter, but I hope it won't
recur too often!
PAPER
BUILD UP
The reason
I take an earlyish flight is to arrive in good time to go through all
the faxes and printed out e-mails and prepare for the business of the
week that relates to my Committee responsibilities.
Sometimes, there is some burning crisis or issue that demands
attention. I was lucky this time and nothing blew up in my absence.
(Perhaps I should use a different expression because there was
a memo about terrorist threats to bomb the Parliament, and all these
years I reckoned nobody thought we were worth bothering about).
I didn't clear the papers until the next morning, however.
POMP
& CEREMONY LACKING
In
Committee terms, the main business afoot was to be the voting on two
telecoms reports in an extraordinary meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday evening.
For the Parliament, it was the presentation of the Commission
Annual Programme of Work for 2001 by President Prodi, combined with an
Oral Question on the follow-up to the Nice European Council.
This exercise is akin to the Queen's speech setting out the
Government's programme at the beginning of each annual session of the
Houses of Parliament. Without
the pomp and ceremony and sense of occasion, of course.
FINE
BALANCING ACT
It mostly
passed me by as I was concentrating on the voting lists for the telecoms
reports in committee. It is
the responsibility of the co-ordinator
to oversee the process to ensure our rapporteur or shadow
rapporteur has got it right and is not setting a list in line with a
particular industry, national interest or vested interest.
This is often a balancing act between different points of view within
our political group, both between national delegations and the different
parts of the centre right political spectrum.
Striking the balance is one way in which co-ordinators exert
their power and influence as long as they don't go too far in pursuit of
their own agenda or priorities.
COMPLICATED
DIRECTIVES
In this
case the outcome is important for the whole telecoms industry in Europe
for the next few years because the legislation for the directives we are
amending will set the regulatory framework of the market and the
industry. The draft
directives we were concerned with for this meeting are "Access to,
and interconnection of, electronic communications networks and
associated facilities" and "Authorisation of electronic
communications networks and services".
Sounds complicated to me and I have been studying the proposals
since last autumn.
COMMON
LICENSING RULES
However
"access" is mainly about regulating commercial relations
between network operators whether they own infrastructure (aerial masts
and the like) or are 'virtual' in that they use someone else's physical
network. While 'authorisation'
is about establishing common rules for licensing new entrants to the
market in all Member States. In
both cases these are issues related to the powers of National Regulatory
Authorities (NRAs) to oblige 'incumbents' to allow access to their
infrastructure or to obstruct new entrants from being granted
authorisation in a particular national market which make it necessary to
give the European Commission a role to oversee fair play.
A
BALANCING ACT
Both
rapporteurs are members of my group, the EPP-ED or European Peoples
Party - European Democrats, and were in effect appointed by me.
'Access' has an Italian rapporteur who tends to favour the
incumbents and 'authorisation' has
a German rapporteur who favours NRAs , so I feel it necessary to
re-balance things a bit more in favour of new entrants and against any
NRA which might be tempted to keep out foreign interlopers from its own
country, Germany for instance.
ACHIEVING
CONSENSUS
The voting
takes 1½ hours despite some hard work put in by the rapporteurs and
their shadows from other groups to combine a number of amendments into
so-called compromise amendments or oral amendments designed to make
wording more acceptable. These
are both devices to get round the deadline date for amendments without
opening up the situation for a whole lot of new amendments.
It is also a way of achieving a modicum of consensus across the
political groups.
EQUAL
SUPPORT
In
addition to this, I am involved in vetting two batches of proposed
amendments to the draft directive on Waste electrical and electronic
equipment or WEEE (just another form of waste flow, you might say).
The two
batches are from the retail and producer sectors of the industry who
each have different concerns about the implications of the draft
directive and how it will all work in practice.
I have sympathy with both points of view and as they are not
mutually contradictory, am happy to put in the amendments.
KEEPING
TO DEADLINES
The
deadline for putting down amendments to our committee opinion on this
draft directive is noon on Wednesday, so the important thing is to bring
them in on time, having checked that they make sense.
It is possible, even desirable, to withdraw amendments later,
whereas, it is not possible to introduce new ones after the deadline and
the first reading stage is the only time for submitting amendments.
At second reading it is only possible to re-introduce amendments
adopted by the Parliament but rejected by the Council for their Common
position.
LOBBYING
GALORE
Other
issues are on the go as well. We
have all been deluged with lobbying e-mails from librarians, authors and
other parties interested in the copyright in the Information Society
directive which is about extending copyright protection to the internet
and other new media. Once again a balance has to be struck between the rights of
authors, the commercial interest of publishers and the general interest
of library users and students in copying for personal use.
It is not my Committee that handles it so I follow the
Conservative Whip set by colleagues on the Legal Affairs Committee.
As owner of a map publishing business and the residual copyright
in my father's books, I have an interest in the matter.
CREATING
A LOOPHOLE
A nice
lady from Tate & Lyle comes to lobby brief me on sugar and the
everything but arms proposal. Both
the processing industry and
the ACP (African Caribbean and Pacific countries with historical trading
links with EU member states) producers fear this measure aimed at
opening EU markets to the poorest 48 countries exports could be open to
abuse and create a loophole in existing quota and market structures.
It should be said that the EU is already open to an overwhelming
majority of produce categories from these countries.
LIBERALISING
MARKETS
Then I
receive a visit from the American energy company ENRON and people from
the European Association of Energy Traders who tell me about proposals
working their way through the Commission to do with further opening and
liberalising of the gas and electricity markets.
This is all very interesting and encouraging (especially if it
means putting the French on the spot for their blatant obstruction and
evasion of liberalisation so far), but slightly irritating that I have
to hear such detailed information from industry sources, rather than the
Commission, because legislative proposals come to us almost last.
NATIONAL
PRIDE REINS
A snippy
bit to finish with. On
Wednesday morning the Commissioner responding during the votes was Pedro
Solbes Mira from Spain. He
forgot himself and made one response in English which was greeted with a
cry of Espanol from one of our EPP Spanish colleagues.
Clearly, Europe of the nations has a long way to go before the
European project has any chance of overcoming national identity and
pride.
GILES
CHICHESTER MEP
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