The European Parliament in July 2005

I put on record that this was the third successive month that Robert Kilroy Silk failed to attend any of the plenary sessions of the Parliament. In fact he hasn’t been there since 12 April. For this he is paid a full parliamentary salary. The situation illustrates one of the pitfalls of the regional list system of election – its lack of personal accountability. Wherever he was, Kilroy wasn’t here and I hope the news shames those who so rashly voted for UKIP and got him elected in his region.

 

As it happens, this month the Parliament did exercise one of its real powers: the ability to reject a proposal from the Commission. MEPs can do this in one of two ways. We can have a formal vote to reject a text at the very end of all the possible processes of conciliation with the Council of Ministers. This needs an absolute majority of MEPs voting to exercise the veto (367 MEPs). Or, as on this occasion, we can vote earlier on to reject a text when it seems that however much we alter it there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole proposal. The Commission then has to respond, to say whether it will have another go with a different text or will simply abandon the project.

 

The proposal we rejected was one on the patenting of computer software. I had hundreds of letters about it from round the South West and beyond – all firmly against it. The Commission made the proposal in an attempt to harmonise the EU’s different national approaches to patenting inventions that rely on software. The idea was simply to codify the existing practices of national patent offices and the European Patent Office in Munich.  But once launched into public debate things heated up very quickly. One key question raised was whether inventions that rely on software should be patentable at all. Some, particularly in small companies, feared that the new law might lead to a US-style situation where generous patenting of software works to the advantage of big companies. Others argued that patents were good for innovation and competitiveness. It was far from clear that there were any real benefits to be gained and in the end MEPs voted by 648 votes to 14 to reject the proposal. The Commission reacted by saying that it would not try to pick up the pieces and would only introduce another measure if MEPs request it – which seems unlikely. Meanwhile patents will continue to be granted by national authorities.

 

On 12 July the European Court of Justice handed down its ruling in favour of the validity of the EU directive on food supplements. This is the one you may have seen referred to in the press and in health food shops because of fears that it will remove from the market certain vitamins and mineral supplements that fall foul of it. The ruling came after hopes had been raised that the directive would not come into force when the Court’s Advocate General gave an interim opinion that it lacked “transparency” in the way that substances will be reviewed by the European Food Standards Agency.

 

There is a great temptation for politicians to get onto this directive and ride hard in an anti-EU direction, since the proposal has become associated with red tape and unnecessary bans. Actually, the directive (6 pages long) is perfectly sensible if you accept the premise that in an open market (think of all the Bulgarian hemlock that will soon be available) we need to be sure that the supplements that we buy are safe. Annex 1 lists vitamins and mineral supplements that may be used in food supplements (e.g. calcium). Annex 2 lists the forms that may be used for the manufacture of food supplements (e.g. calcium glycerophosphate – which sounds rather too like what I have just put on the bindweed). These are therefore “positive lists”. Contrary to the Daily Mail and others, there is no list of banned substances but, by implication, if a substance is not in one of the two annexes it cannot be used.

 

Will this mean the disappearance of products people value? There is a grace period from now until 31 December 2009 when existing products containing substances not included in the annexes may continue to be sold. But the idea is that gradually the European Food Safety Agency (based in Parma, with a British director) will evaluate all existing food supplements for safety purposes, and the same process will apply if anyone wants to add a substance to the positive lists. The Court of Justice did underline that “A refusal [by the EFSA] must be open to challenge before the courts”. Maximum amounts of vitamins and minerals in food supplements will be set similarly by taking into account scientific risk assessment.

 

Why bring forward such an interfering directive in the first place? Why not rely on mutual recognition of each other’s laws? Because mutual recognition was not working and national rules were blocking the free movement of goods. So this is a real Common Market law of the most basic type. I would be interested to hear from anyone who believes that a product has been withdrawn from the market as a result of the new law, as popular scare stories would have us believe.

 

We had Labour Ministers in our committees this month. Margaret Beckett got nul points from the Agriculture Committee when it appeared that she didn’t know, or care, much about the subject and could not give any details of the British plans for CAP reform. Some MEPs walked out in protest. She gave a similarly disengaged and condescending performance before the Environment Committee. Her colleague Patricia Hewitt also appeared as Minister for Health and was infuriating in a different way, because she speaks in CAPITAL LETTERS, as though to very dim children.

 

The Equitable Life scandal has resurfaced in the Parliament. The Petitions Committee is about to consider a petition asking the Commission to institute legal proceedings against the British government for failing to protect European citizens. It is reckoned that 50,000 annuitants across Europe have seen their incomes reduced by a third. In my view the petitions procedure of the Parliament is cruelly incomplete, because it raises hopes that it rarely fulfils. It is not certain that the Committee will back the request to the Commission and that if it does so the Commission will do anything about it. But it’s always worth trying.