A difficult month. My husband left the Conservative party to join the Labour ranks, I was either under suspicion or treated with silent sympathy as someone who has suffered a recent death in the family; the cat (a staunchly British Blue) was terrorised by a persistent and noisy ginger tom (clearly a Liberal Democrat).

For the record, I remain one of your Conservative MEPs. As such I am happy to be part of the largest, most free market oriented, political group in the European Parliament (the European People's Party and European Democrat group). The agenda in Europe is very different from that in Westminster and my views are miles from those of the Socialist group, where German MEPs in particular continue to promote enthusiastically the costly agenda that has created 5 million unemployed in their country, and means that Europe lags way behind the Americans.

 

Conservative MEPs are making a very important contribution in Europe by emphasising the need to keep a tighter control on the tendency of the European Commission to over-legislate; the need to ask tough questions about the likely cost of new EU law, and the need to push the Commission to make much more of its role in supervising the implementation of the laws we have, rather than endlessly produce new ones.

 

On the Constitution, Robert and I simply differ. I think the final text goes much further than is necessary or than was outlined in the original prescription given to the Convention that drafted it. I support the view put forward by Tim Kirkhope MEP, the Conservative MEPs' new leader, that we need a new Treaty to make the necessary technical arrangements to adjust for a wider Community - but that is all we do need. Beyond that, rumours of clashes in the Jackson household - meals withheld, laundry undone - are entirely without foundation: we have been married for 30 years and have weathered worse than this.

 

There were two parliamentary sessions this month. In the first, Strasbourg, one, MEPs adopted a report approving the European constitution by 500 votes to 137 with 40 abstentions. The "No" vote included those, like me, who believe that the Constitution does more than it should, and those like the French far Left who think it does too little. We were not voting on the Constitution itself, but on a lengthy motion by two "rapporteurs". This was congratulatory in tone: it applauded the Treaty's greater "clarity", and welcomed more majority voting and (supposedly) greater accountability, introduced through the incorporation of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. But it is now all up to those 9 states which have referenda, starting with Spain on 20 February. Three states, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovenia, have now ratified the Constitution by parliamentary vote. In Britain, the parliamentary vote will come first but final ratification is dependent on a Yes vote in our referendum.

 

The President of the Commission, Mr Barroso, presented his 5 year strategy at this session. Bits of it could have been written for Mrs Thatcher when Prime Minister. He emphasised the need to make legislation "simpler, more coherent and effectively implemented" and said that all new proposals would be subject to impact analyses, to see that they respect the principles of proportionality, subsidiarity and value added.   Weeding out the jargon that means they won't try to do things others (member states, local authorities) do better, or try to do too much at great cost. No Commission Presidency that I can recall has been focussed in this way. This attitude is reflected in the new environment programme. In previous years this has dripped with new directives but we are promised thematic strategies which may or may not give rise to new laws one day.

 

The parts of his speech that would have had Mrs Thatcher taking a grip on her handbag contained the future size of the EU budget. The Commission wants to enlarge this beyond the present £66 billion a year, and Barroso is fiercely resisting attempts by the contributor Member States (Germany, Britain, France, Holland Austria and Sweden) to reduce the budget in 2006. This poses a dilemma for us in the South West. Bristol is highly likely to lose its Objective 2 EU status (based on GDP per head) from 2006. Gordon Brown wants to end EU regional policy in its present form in order to concentrate on Eastern Europe (and allow him to subsidise Labour held seats in the North). So Cornwall may lose its more generous Objective One status. If we want Bristol and Cornwall to continue to get EU funding then we are going to have to accept paying more into the EU budget. Incidentally I find it extraordinary that some schemes in Bristol are threatened with closure if the Objective 2 money runs out. EU funding was never meant to be a constant drip feed.

 

I was visited this month by the director of the Culham research laboratory in Oxfordshire, where they are working on nuclear fusion; a process that they believe could supply our energy needs from the 2050s. But what happens before then? While we turn off lights and build ugly and inefficient wind turbines, China is adding one coal fired power station the size of Didcot to its energy capacity every three weeks.

 

At the second parliamentary session in Brussels we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. After we had stood for a silent minute, and heard speeches I became aware that my Polish MEP neighbour, Stanislaw Jalowiecki, was becoming restless. I asked what the trouble was: He said "They mention everyone who was in Auschwitz except the Polish prisoners." Then he told me his grandfather had been a prisoner there, part of the round up of Polish intelligentsia by the Nazis, from 1939 to 1945. He survived this and the "Death march" to Dachau and lived till 1948. Stanislaw's father had spent the war in Mauthausen concentration camp. The Second War is not so distant for these people and it does not take much to open old wounds. Ukraine's future as a possible EU member is a tremendous bone of contention between the Poles (who want them in the EU) and the Germans (who want to invent a non-member special status for them). There are storms ahead on the Eastern frontier.