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SOUTH WEST FIRST

Letter From Strasbourg  October 2001  

WELCOME SECURITY

My current route to Strasbourg is via Stuttgart (I will go a long way to avoid travelling with the shrugged shoulder brigade, otherwise known as Air France or having to change planes somewhere like Brussels, as many colleagues are obliged to do), which is served by both BA and BMI (British Midland renamed) flights.  It is a very efficient airport, and so it was there that I had my first experience of heightened security when the Immigration Officer decided he didn't recognise my EU Laissez-Passer travel document.  He took me off to a side room largely populated by individuals of a Middle Eastern appearance, while he consulted his superiors.  As it happens my Laissez-Passer was returned in about a minute, so I was hardly delayed at all and emerged, feeling:-

a)        re-assured that they were being ultra cautious

b)       relieved that I could avoid making a fuss about being held up.

SEPTEMBER 11TH

My last newsletter went to press, so to speak, before the events of September 11^th so this is my first opportunity to comment upon them.  I never thought I would see scenes that I associate with disaster movies, and far fetched ones at that, played out on television for real.  The images of airplanes flying into the towers of the World Trade Center, fiery explosions blossoming forth and then the incredible unbelievable sight of the towers collapsing in upon themselves, are etched in my memory.  I am fortunate, when the world was different, to have been to the top of those towers back in the 1970s and I shan't forget that either.  Nor shall I forget that moment at 3 a.m. in the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 when I experienced my closest brush so far with an act of terrorism.

DOUBLE STANDARDS

I mention that as a lead in to observe that, while I am quite certain the UK should stand shoulder to shoulder with the USA in this matter, and that our new Conservative Party Leader, Ian Duncan Smith (IDS), is absolutely correct in his judgement to support Prime Minister Blair in this matter, there is just the teeniest whiff of inconsistency, or, dare I suggest, double standards of El Presidente Tony.   I welcome ringing denunciations of terrorists and terrorism by the head of government, but is this the same chap who has cheerfully presided over the release of hundreds of terrorists from UK prisons prematurely, long before they had completed their sentences handed down in a court of law?  I think it is necessary to stand up to people who seek to achieve their aims and objectives through the use of force, whether it be bullying in school or IRA bombs, although I recognise the difficulty in confronting people who are  willing to make the ultimate sacrifice of their own cause.

LEADERSHIP BALLOT

Something else happened that week of September 11^th, which has been overshadowed by those events and yet is of great importance to Conservatives, and, I believe, the rest of our country.  I refer to the result of our leadership ballot of all the members of the Party.  Ian Duncan Smith won by a decisive majority in a turnout much higher than predicted by outside pundits.  Because of that and the breathing space in national politics caused by the outbreak of bi-partisanship over the UK stance in the war against terrorism, we have a clear opportunity to start with a clean slate on the road to unity and the long haul back to power.  If we are able to set on one side the issue of Europe and the euro, until there is a referendum, so as to concentrate on being in favour of things and to re-state our values and beliefs in language relevant to contemporary Britain, then we could surprise everybody, not least ourselves, at how fast we recover ground.

A GOOD START

It seems to me that IDS has made quite a good start.  As part of that, he came this week to visit we Conservative MEPs in Strasbourg.  We were able to point out that his predecessor had not been able to come out and meet our delegation.  We took note that it was us he came to see, not bigwigs from other countries.  Without going into the detail of all the things that were discussed, I must say that I was impressed at the way he listened with a clearly open mind, yet was comfortable in displaying a quiet leadership on points where he had made up his mind.  To have to confidence to say he hadn't really thought about something yet and display realism about our political situation at present, seemed very encouraging to me.

A FRESH APPROACH

A large part of the Tuesday was taken up with his visit and meetings, but later that evening I received an interesting and somwhat unexpected view on his prospects of a successful leadership from a journalist.  To my surprise this journalist (and I'm not revealing my source) did not parrot the usual drivel about right wing extremism taking over the Party but talked about an open minded, flexible and pragmatic approach which could surprise people and make it much more difficult for New Labour media manipulators to indulge in misrepresentation and smears.  We shall see.  Final thought, with his background and experience outside the world of politics, IDS seems very much a complete sort of chap, a rounded personality, and that gives me confidence for the future.

TOO MANY AMENDMENTS

So what else was on the agenda this week in Strasbourg?  In Committee terms we had a special meeting in the morning for a first consideration of the amendments to the Commission proposal for realising the European Research Area, otherwise known to most of us as the Sixth Framework Programme (6FP) of European Research.  There are some 580 amendments put down by our committee plus several hundred (I admit I don't know precisely how many because I had no time to count them all!) amendments in the opinions from all the other Committees that have an interest in the 6FP.

SENSIBLE VIEWS PREVAIL

The meeting was for the Rapporteur, Gerald Caudron, and shadow rapporteurs from other groups, plus interested parties like myself as co-ordinator to discuss procedure and timetable.  Everyone on the left wanted to stick to the original timetable set back in the summer of voting in Committee next week and having the 1^st Reading in the October II Plenary session.  We in the EPP-ED disagreed with this hopelessly unrealistic target and argued that with a little more time we could all co-operate to whittle down the amendments to a more manageable number prior to voting.  By the evening meeting of the full com-mittee our more sensible view pre-vailed, although we had to spend an hour and half debating the matter.

TRICKY ISSUES

But at the same time that morning, another meeting was held in the room next door to discuss the 2^nd Reading of the Telecoms Package which is also very important.  One difficulty was that some of the players were common to each meeting.  I felt rather like a meeting tourist as I slipped from one to the other until I was put on the spot in one of them because our group shadow rapporteur was in the other meeting and I had to get more involved.  The telecoms package is much further along the legislative path, but that means that the issues outstanding are the trickiest to resolve.  The  key issues relate to the role of the European Commission and the NRAs (National Regulatory Authorities) and whether the former can overturn decisions taken by the latter.  Some Member States are most reluctant to permit any intervention while quite a few telecom companies are very worried about being at the mercy of their NRAs without recourse to appeal procedures that can operate fast enough to cope with a rapidly changing market situation.

WIN WIN SITUATION

I had to stay late in the Parliament on the Tuesday in order to speak in the debate on the 2^nd Reading of a proposal for a Regulation establishing a voluntary code for energy efficiency labelling on office equipment.  This seems quite a sensible approach, particularly as the scheme would mirror a comparable one in the U.S.A., and thereby create common standards across the Atlantic.  My wife and I were directly influenced by energy efficiency labelling when buying replacements for the old freezer and fridge units in our Devon home last summer.  I mentioned this in the debate with the thought that I was really motivated by wanting to buy less electricity from our local French owned electricity distributor.  The irony is that both freezer and fridge were made in France!

EXPOSING THE TRUTH

My colleagues in the Agriculture Committee spent the week working hard to achieve sufficient signatures for a resolution establishing a special Committee of Inquiry into the outbreak of FMD - Foot and Mouth Disease.  I hope we succeed in this, both because there must be lessons to learn and because our Labour opponents were as keen to establish such a committee on BSE, as they are reluctant for this one to come about.  Funny that, they thought the BSE Committee would embarrass the then Conservative Government while we may just possibly think an inquiry into FMD might expose the failings of the present Labour Government.

DON'T MENTION FOOTBALL

Finally, I received my translated text of  the 159 amendments to my Report on Security of Supply for Energy in Europe.  This will provide weekend reading and keep me busy in Committee next week after the Party Conference.  My main shadow rapporteur is a German Social Democrat, Mrs Mechtild Rothe by name, who is very green and anti-nuclear in outlook.  I hope she isn't a football fan because that might make our discussions on energy policy even more heated!

From the start of my first term as MEP, I have published a monthly programme to show what I do and where. Occasionally, I cover something different such as the study of trade and payments figures, which I did last year.  This time, I thought, having done one letter from Strasbourg this month, I would describe a Brussels week for a change, starting Monday 15^th October.

Normally I would catch a Eurostar from Waterloo early enough to reach my office in Brussels by 12.30 (two hours 43 minutes plus the hour's time difference), but on this day I had to change the routine in order to attend a memorial service in London.  This was a sad occasion for me because we were remembering the life of Monica Cooper who worked for my father and with me in our family map publishing business from 1949 until 1994.  It was pretty much like saying goodbye to a member of the family.

It was a bad day for travel, as well, because the train I was intending to catch in the afternoon was cancelled due to a strike in Belgium, so we had to do some fast footwork to find an alternative route, in order that I could make my evening com-mitment in Brussels.  In the end I was able to reach Heathrow in time to catch a Sabena  flight, though it seemed in doubt as I had to wait nearly half an hour for a Heathrow

tube train at Hammersmith and only just got there in time.  I have learned to adopt a fatalistic patience in such situations, along the line of, if you can't affect it, don't fret about it, but even so, one is not entirely immune to anxiety!

I had spent the morning in my London office dictating a tape of replies to constituency corres-pondence to send to my secretary Moyra in Exeter, in between phone calls to Brussels and Exeter about travel arrangements.  Had I taken the morning train I would have had to get off at Lille and be taken by coach to Brussels, so all in all it was a tricky day for travel.

The evening commitment (I had missed afternoon meetings of my Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy Committee, as well as the co-ordinators of the committee) was a dinner discussion with a visiting team from the South West RDA (Regional Development Agency) headed by Chairman, Sir Michael Lickiss.  I was late, but only by a few minutes.  The discussion focussed on the role of the RDA, its relationship with the regions MEPs (four of us were there) and the Commission, the launch of a new South West office to represent the local authorities of the whole region, as well as all the issues facing one part or another of the South West.

Of course, all this presumes the region is more than just an artificial construct by the Labour Government and the European Commission trying to persuade the different parts that they really are one region.  I see no sign of this on

the ground, and little enthusiasm for it except among certain parts of the political chattering classes otherwise known as the Lib Dems.  Nevertheless the RDA exists and we must work with it as best we can.  My colleague Caroline Jackson suggested one possible regional role for the RDA could be to co-ordinate solutions to the big challenge of waste disposal under new tougher European legislation.

This gave me the opportunity to suggest RDA could stand for Rubbish Disposal Agency but this was greeted with barely polite laughter by the RDA people.  Also present was the new head of the new representative office.  She was a charming young woman whom I subsequently learned comes from Greece.  She knew lots about all the hot air regional proposals of the European Commission and its President Mr Prodi (good on talk, even better at not doing much), but I gather she had not actually been to the South West at the time she was appointed.

Tuesday morning at nine sharp I am in Committee, electronic voting card at the ready for a long stint of voting.  The main piece of business was part of the Caudron Report on the Commission proposal for a 6^th Framework Programme of European Research 2002-2006, and I mean only part, because we had nearly 600 amendments from Committee members plus several hundred in the opinions of all the other committees to vote on.  In addition we had nearly 160 amendments to my own Report on the Security of Supply of Energy in Europe.  Normally, we vote on a show of hands, but if there are many close results which require counting by the secretariat staff of the Committee, it can take a lot of time, so we try to use committee rooms fitted with electronic voting to speed matters up.

Even so we did not complete voting until after twelve and as coordinator I have to put my hand up for every single vote, electronic or not, to show thumbs up, thumbs down or hand flat for yes, no or abstain.  So it gets a bit tiring.  Things went reasonably well at first as we seemed to be winning most of the contested votes on the research report, but when it came to my report there was a turn for the worse.  A number of my EPP-ED (European People's Party-European Democrats, of which we Conservatives are allied members) colleagues went off to vote in another committee where other important votes on legislation were taking place.  My report is not a legislative one. 

Then the Liberals teamed up with the Greens and Socialists on the issue of nuclear energy and a few other aspects, so I found myself suffering the indignity of both having parts of my draft text suppressed and having alternative Green text inserted instead.  My attempts at compromise along the lines of "I will accept most of your text as an addition if you don't delete chunks of mine so we include both the points of view", were unsuccessful.  I emerged from the long session feeling distinctly bruised and defeated with only the minor amusement of hearing a new definition of Greens as genetically modified Communists.  I am thinking hard on how I can recover the situation.

In the afternoon I have a meeting with representatives of the Steel Industry which is having a tough time of it, what with the burden of Labour's Climate Change Levy in the U.K. and protectionist measures by the U.S.A., as well as competition from cheap imports from unlikely places like Russia, to contend with.  The Climate Change

Levy is a classic illustration of how good intentions get to become a too clever by half idea, which does little to improve the environment, while significantly damaging the competitiveness of U.K. industry through fiscal and administrative burdens which don't apply in other countries.

Next I have to dash to the Working Group B meeting where EPP-ED members of the various committees of the Parliament (including my Industry Committee) carried on discussing items on the agenda for the next weeks plenary session.  I have to discuss the possibility of a Statement from the Commission on aspects of safety in travel and transport arising from the events of 11^th September.  This will be used by the Greens as an opportunity to mount another attack on nuclear energy in parallel with a move by Irish MEPs to raise for the umpteenth time, the issue of Sellafield and the nuclear fuel reprocessing done there by British Nuclear Fuels.  The general strategy agreed with my counterpart co-ordinator on the Transport Committee is to try to have the item deferred until the November plenary session when Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio would be able to attend and respond or, failing that, to have a debate without a written resolution.  We shall see.

After that it is back to my office for an interview with the BBC about my views on the new regional office.  I try to be polite in expressing the hope that it will help the region, while hinting strongly at my reservations about the whole regional agenda being pursued by both the Labour Government and the European Commission, albeit for rather different motives.  I don't think the South West as presently defined, is a coherent and integrated entity and I do think it was better served by smaller representative offices covering smaller areas, just as I think it was better served by constituency MEPs.

Then I have to head off for a most important engagement, namely half an hour of kinesitherapie for a bout of brachial neuralgia in my shoulder.  Massage in other words, but I thought I would put it that way before anyone leapt to quite the wrong conclusion.  Immediately after that I am in a meeting with the Treasurer of the EPP-ED Group and the Secretary General of the Group to discuss financial matters, wearing my hat as Treasurer to the UK delegation of Conservative MEPs.

On the Wednesday morning I have a German lesson for an hour first thing followed by a meeting at ten a.m. with a couple of chaps from Astrium, lobbying about aerospace matters.  In particular, they wanted to talk about Galileo, the proposed European alternative to and competitor with GPS (the American satellite global positioning system).  After that there was a visit from Mr Kessler of Eutop, a German consultancy, to talk about his company.  I should add that it was he that organised a visit I made recently to Leipzig, to see the new Power Exchange there and the

headquarters of Verbundnetsgaz A.G., a major gas supply industry.  Still in the morning I attended the routine meeting for all EPP-ED co-ordinators from all the committees.  Sometimes I need to intervene on matters relating to my committee  but this time I was able to sit and listen to the discussion with one ear, while working my way through a file of correspondence, emails and invitations which accumulates in Brussels when I am elsewhere.

At lunchtime we have a working lunch of Conservative spokesmen to discuss the business of the next

week's plenary agenda and sort out any difficulties over a line to take.  The main topic of conversation was inevitably at present, the campaign against terrorism and the EU response.  Immediately after that we have a meeting of the full delegation of Conservative MEPs for a briefing on any particular points on the plenary agenda followed by a discussion on more general issues.  At 3.30 that meeting breaks up, so we can move on to the next one, this time a full meeting of the Group, or in my case a private meeting with three representatives of EURELECTRIC, the Europe wide trade association of the electricity industry.  We discuss the results of voting on my security of supply report and the priorities they would like to see included.

And so it goes on with a series of meetings, either pre-planned by appointment or arranged at short notice with colleagues or secretariat staff to discuss something or other until the early evening.

On Thursday morning I think I have a relatively clear diary which should give me time to go through some of the piles of accumulated documents in my office, with a view to discard some, and reminding myself about others.  Wrong.  I have forgotten appointments that I have agreed to do, but must have been in enough of a rush not to write them into my pocket diary.  At 9.30 a visit from a consultant to discuss re-scheduling a proposed visit to a metals re-cycling plant in Belgium for colleagues on the Industry Committee, which I had to postpone to make way for a visit by a group from the House of Lords Select Committee wanting to talk about the security of supply of electricity.  Next I have two visitors from ETSO (the European Transmission System Operators) who want to talk about the draft directive on cross border trading in electricity.  This is interesting stuff for me to discuss the politics behind the attitudes of the Spanish and the Germans, both of whom have a particular agenda they are pursuing.  The Germans don't have a national regulator for energy and don't like the directive requirement that there should be one in each Member State.  The Spanish feel blocked from access to European markets by the French (well don't we all, as far as that goes!).

At 11.30 it is time to switch topics to telecoms and listen to the eloquent advocate of Orange arguing against certain amendments by colleagues to the various directives that make up the telecom package, on the subjects of roaming, call termination and the relationship between the European Commission and the NRAs (National Regulatory Authorities). Immediately after that I have to pack my briefcase and join in an all too rushed glass of wine with my outgoing assistant Pauline, who is leaving me to join the enemy, so to speak, by taking a job in the European Commission.  I am very sorry to lose her, but hope that my new assistant Natalie will prove equal to the challenge.  

My final meeting before heading for the airport was lunch with the new Director of the Joint Research Centre.  This is the inhouse research entity of the Commission.  He is a splendid Irishman called Barry McSweeney who is good company and a skilful operator.  He is gently lobbying me about one or two amendments to the 6^th Framework Programme.

Then its rush to the airport, fly to London Heathrow, tube in to the centre of town, drop my bags at my London office and home before pressing on to keep my five o'clock  appointment with my counterparts in the new team of shadow ministers covering trade and industry in the new Portcullis House.  This is an important part of my brief as Conservative spokesman in the European Parliament, to maintain good contacts with the home team and we mostly discuss organisational matters about how to meet, when and where.  It seems a good start to me, rather in keeping with what seems a good start by Iain Duncan Smith and his team overall, even though it is early days.

Friday sees me heading south west by early morning train to Exeter, where I collect a car and drive to Newton Abbot to talk to a bunch of students at Coombeshead College.  They ask me a lot of good questions about biological and chemical warfare, and aspects of my work as an MEP.  I feel on my mettle, which is very good for me.  Then I drive on to Prawle Point to visit the lookout that the National Coastwatch Institution is building and man all year round during daylight hours with volunteers. This is splendid stuff, they are doing a good job in the fine tradition of voluntary work that is so important in our country.  Then I drive home for a brief pause before heading up the A303 for an evening Conservative function at Bourton & Silton near Wincanton. The questions are penetrating here as well.

The week ends for me after a foray to Broadmayne near Dorchester for a coffee morning and discussion, by watching on video the Ireland/ England Rugby International.  Disappointing result, but I suppose we can't win them all.