SOUTH WEST FIRST
Letter From Strasbourg
June
2001
TAUNTON BLUE AGAIN
There is no point in beating
about the bush, I got it wrong. My
confident expectation about the election result proved quite unfounded.
It is going to cost me a few bottles settling up the sporting
bets I had with friends and colleagues about how many seats we would
gain. That is a small price
for me when set against the loss of good men like Patrick Nicholls,
Christopher Fraser and Ian Bruce, not to mention the disappointment for
our candidates in target constituencies, where I helped with high hopes
of supporting success in Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Gloucester.
Well done indeed to Adrian Flook for dispossessing that Lib Dem
in Taunton.
THE
TACTICAL PRESS
The campaign and its aftermath
have, of course, been the main talking point among Conservative
colleagues this week. There
was a high degree of consensus that we made a tactical error in going on
so much about Europe when we had much else to say in positive vein about
education, the government's taxation record compared with our
aspirations, our rural policies and so on.
There was much sympathy for the treatment dished out to William
Hague by the press and media and great admiration for his fortitude in
response and his dignified resignation as Leader.
BALLOT
CONUNDRUM
And of course we talked a lot
about the coming election for a new leader.
It is regrettable, but true, that we must learn more lessons from
New Labour before we are able to get back in a position to win a
national general election (we need few lessons in winning a European
General Election as we proved two years ago when Labour had nothing to
say and the Lib Dems did not dare say what they wanted).
One lesson is to compare our two rules of procedure for electing
a leader, particularly the early stages.
We Conservative MEPs find it quite extraordinary that we should
have no say in the matter until the final ballot of all party members,
while the MPs, just 166 of them, have a monopoly of all preliminary
stages.
LETS
THINK AGAIN
In the last leadership election
four years ago, we were consulted individually and the result was
communicated to the 1922 Committee (all our MPs, or about the same
number as now), along with the views of Peers taking the Conservative
whip and all constituency association chairmen, in a poll conducted by
the then National Union. You
will forgive my reminding you that on that occasion every other branch
of the party reached a different conclusion from the MPs and each was in
favour of the same candidate in every case.
One can only guess at how much better we would have done in the
election had that advice been accepted by our MPs, but I doubt very much
it could have been worse.
USING
ALL OUR STRENGTH
We MEPs have strong credentials
to be more involved in the early stages of this forthcoming election.
We went through a testing selection procedure culminating
in a meeting open to all members of the Party in each region to
attend and vote. We were
elected by significantly more votes than an individual MP achieves.
We represent every part of Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland
and Wales), which means
we cover vast areas of the
country where there are no Conservative MPs.
And by virtue of representing regions containing many Westminster
constituencies, we have a wider experience and feel for opinion than an
individual constituency M.P.
UNITED
IN BATTLE AHEAD
In case you want to know, it is
a matter of public record that all seventeen Conservative MEPs who
expressed a view in 1997 (one was also a recently elected MP who
declined to answer) supported Ken Clarke.
I did so, because in my judgement at that time, he was best
placed to gain public support and give the government a bruising
opposition. Once the
contest was over, William Hague had my full support, not least for his
command of the dispatch box at Prime Ministers Questions.
This time, I think that MEPs should be consulted and that the
contest must go to a national ballot of all members to ensure the
new leader has the authority of the whole of the party behind him or her
in the task ahead.
IRISH
CAT STOPS NICE PIDGEONS
Another result was much
discussed in the European Parliament, namely the 'no' vote in the Irish
Referendum on the Nice Treaty. The
rejection by Irish votes has somewhat put a cat among the pigeons of the
European political classes because it means the whole Treaty is on hold.
I would have thought that coming not long after a no vote in
Denmark about joining the Euro, this result would give the missionaries
of European integration pause for thought about both the pace and
content of the project.
MURPHY'S
LAW
Not a bit of it to listen to
some Irish MEPs in our EPP-ED (European Peoples Party-European
Democrats) parliamentary political group who between them denounced
Irish voters for being stupid, attacked those leading the 'no campaign'
as wicked and misleading (they threw out Dana, MEP from their
delegation), and muttered darkly about foreign intervention to unfairly
influence the result. From
which I deduce that people are all in favour of democracy until the vote
goes against them, when it is all head in the sand stuff, rather than
reflect why. We, after all,
are having to go through the process of figuring out why we lost again
so badly.
INTO
HARNESS OVER EUROPE
Otherwise I attended three
meetings of our group, two meetings of my Industry Committee, a meeting
of my Delegation for Inter Parliamentary relations with Australia and
New Zealand, a meeting of the Bureau (or management committee) of
British Conservatives, chaired a co-ordination meeting of all EPP
members of the Industry Committee, chaired our regular Conservative
Enterprise Europe luncheon, had meetings with four different groups of
lobbyists and two groups of students from the French Ecole Nationale
d'Administration, spoke in a debate in the Chamber on the subject of
Europe's oil supply, attended a seminar about the energy situation and
EU enlargement, attended a board meeting of the European Energy
Foundation and held preliminary discussions about re-establishing the
Ciel and Espace Aerospace Inter Group.
Back to a pretty typical week really.
BURNING
THE MIDNIGHT OIL
The debate on the Linkohr Report
on the Communication from the Commission on the European Union's oil
supply was held late on Wednesday evening and was of particular interest
to me because of my major report on security of supply of energy and
because of the way the vote went on Thursday.
This document was produced last autumn in the aftermath of the
oil price crisis which led to much protest and disruption, not least in
the U.K.
GREEN
SLUDGE DEFEATED
Issues involved include whether
to create bigger stock piles, whether to use them for trying to control
prices or in case of an interruption of supply, whether there should be
an energy chapter in the treaty, whether the taxes on oil should be
harmonised, what measures should be taken to reduce dependence on
imports and whether nuclear energy could have a role to play in reducing
part of oil consumption. We had a predictably close vote on the nuclear paragraph, but
we defeated the attempts of the greens and some socialists to delete the
text altogether. This is
progress, a modest victory for common sense.
NOTHING
IS FREE
The answers to the questions are
no to using stockpiled reserves to manipulate prices (doesn't work); no
to an energy chapter (Member States won't wear it, won't cede
sovereignty in this area and the Commission has sufficient legal base
for market competition and environment protection measures anyway); no
to tax harmonisation (Member States won't wear it); yes to nuclear power
as a part of the alternative to oil.
The answer on other measures to reduce dependence is longer and
more complicated, but there is plenty we can be doing once we gain
public acceptance of the need to change because energy is finite and
certainly not for free.
STOP
PRESS
At the time of writing this, I
don't know the full list of candidates for Leader of the Party. So I am not
going to say whom I might
support.
GILES CHICHESTER MEP
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