The European Parliament in May 2006

The monthly trek of MEPs and staff from Brussels to the plenary session in Strasbourg is a waste of your money and our time. If you support the idea of dropping Strasbourg as a parliamentary meeting place and concentrating on Brussels then please go on-line to web site www.oneseat.eu. There you can sign up to a petition that has already attracted 40,000 signatures. Thank you: we need your help.

 

The big debate in the May plenary took place on the subject of the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU. The Commissioner responsible for enlargement, Mr Olli Rehn, told MEPs that the two countries should still be able to join the EU on 1 January 2007 as originally planned but that they could not be given a definitive green light because they still need to tackle a number of outstanding problems. The Commission will therefore make a new report in October on whether the target date can be met.

 

This means some fast work on a short time scale. In Bulgaria the Commission is worried about the lack of results in the fight against corruption and organised crime and is particularly concerned about money laundering and what will happen to EU funds when they start to flow. There is for example no digital photographic mapping of Bulgarian farm land - an essential tool for the management of direct farm payments. (I met a Bulgarian MP who spoke longingly of her country’s need for an Environment Agency on the British model.) For Romania, the gaps are in rather more technical areas and the Commission admits that the Romanian government has recently put in place a crackdown on corruption and serious crime.

 

The two poles of opinion on the subject were represented in debate by Daniel Cohn Bendit, a French Green MEP and former protest child of 1968 (then known as Danny the Red because his hair colour reflected his opinions), and Geoffrey Van Orden, a Conservative MEP. Cohn-Bendit said that the Commission was being too idealistic in saying that the problems of Bulgaria and Romania would sort themselves out. If they were not ready, they should simply not come in. Geoffrey Van Orden, the Parliament’s rapporteur on Bulgarian membership, pointed out that if the Council really wanted to postpone accession by one year they would have to be unanimous in doing so – and no such proposal had been made. He believed that Bulgaria did fulfil the conditions for accession (with more effort on crime and corruption) on 1 January 2007 and pointed out that its unemployment rate is now lower than that of Germany.

 

Of course we still wait to see whether our own government will allow completely free entry to Bulgarian and Romanian passport holders who wish to work here from day 1 – or whether it will delay such entry, as Germany has done in the case of citizens of the 10 newest member states. One wonders how many more bright young waiters, care assistants etc we can absorb from Eastern Europe and also to what extent their availability acts as a disincentive to our youngsters to enter the service industries. If a recent encounter in Cornwall is anything to go by we are failing to produce and train people to run services in the way Eastern Europeans are good at. I entered a small café near Penzance. The following dialogue took place:

CJ “I would like a cup of tea and a pasty  please”

Gormless local girl: “Ain’t got no pasties left”

CJ “Well, what do you have?

GLG: “I dunno really”

Bring on the Bulgarians, I thought: they can’t be worse than this.

 

The same session of Parliament was addressed by Mr Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, who made no bones about the position of the new Hamas government: “The declared platform of the party that won the elections and formed the government does not conform to my platform and the commitments and prior agreements of the Palestinian Authority”. We were also addressed by Bolivian President Evo Morales who called for EU support in fighting poverty in his country and explained that his government’s nationalisation of the energy sector, involving many EU firms, was “not a matter of expropriation or expulsion” but part of a Bolivian desire to control their own resources. In his first 100 days, 2,000 people had been taught to read. If we continue to allow our schools to churn out illiterates perhaps we should adopt some similar yardstick of progress for the next government.

 

This month we reached agreement on a directive dealing with health claims on food and drink – a common market and consumer protection measure that will apply the same rules everywhere as so much of our food is involved in cross border trade. The new law introduces clear definitions for claims such as “low energy”, “low fat”, “high fibre” and “reduces cholesterol”. The ratios of salt, sugar and fat most appropriate for human health in any given product will be laid down by the Commission in consultation with the food industry, and consumer bodies on the basis of information supplied by the European Food Safety Authority. A producer will be able to make a claim concerning one of the three key ingredients (fat, sugar and salt) if the other two ingredients comply with the law or if it is clearly stated that the product has a “high content” of these ingredients. I imagine that this kind of thing is aimed at products such as those claiming to be “low fat” while actually being stuffed with sugars.

 

Another EU measure adopted this month was the services directive. Although it is somewhat watered down, it still tells Member States to give service providers from another Member State free access and allow them to exercise their business freely. Such companies will no longer need to open an office in another Member State or have a local representative there. “One stop shops” for service providers will be set up to help with the paper work. The idea, which I always thought was doomed, that service providers could work in another Member State according to the rules of their home country has been dropped.

 

Just for the record: it is 6 months on from David Cameron’s election to the party leadership and he has still made no attempt to meet the Conservative MEPs, in London or Brussels.