Dear Reader, 

The Prime Minister came to the Parliament in Strasbourg this month and met the Conservative MEPs before addressing the plenary session on the imminent Hampton Court summit. It was obvious from both encounters that the British Presidency has run into the doldrums because of the impossibility of addressing two crucial issues. Discussion of further CAP reform is blocked by the French, who are playing the same game at the international trade talks. Discussion of budget reform, and a big switch away from funding the CAP, is similarly blocked by the French. We want to keep the national veto: they are effectively exercising it. Currently 44 per cent of the EU budget is spent supporting a sector that accounts for only 2 per cent of the EU’s gross domestic product.

 

Against this background it was interesting to see how our Foreign Office and Cabinet office civil servants had put together a convincing alternative agenda of things to talk about: how Europe could meet the challenge of globalisation and “delocalisation” (= the flow of jobs out of the EU to cheaper climes). Under this heading Blair spoke very well to MEPs about the need for Europe to spend more on research and on improving our universities, where, apart from Oxford and Cambridge, there are no European universities in the top rank to challenge the Americans, and other countries that are coming up fast.

 

The trouble was that the more he talked of the need to modernise and meet the challenge of globalisation to European jobs, the more the Centre Right applauded while the Left sat glumly silent. Had Blair spoken two weeks later his points would have been reinforced by the riots in France; these are a standing indictment of the “social model” beloved of the French Left, which has only delivered very high unemployment.

 

The Strasbourg session was accompanied by a chorus of alarm about bird flu. Edwina Currie-substitute-of-the-month emerged as Mr Herman Koeter of the newly-established European Food Safety Agency in Parma. He walked straight into a storm of criticism by saying that “We have no proof at all that people can contract the virus through the digestive route. However we cannot exclude that theoretically it would be possible for that to happen”. This was picked up all over Europe as meaning that      eating poultry meat and eggs could kill you. The Italian poultry meat market collapsed and in Strasbourg the price of chickens in the local supermarkets fell to 1 Euro each. Mr Koeter is (or was) about to succeed the UK’s man as head of the EFSA and clearly had little experience of handling the press. He was also at odds with yet another EU agency, the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. This merely recommended precautionary measures such as properly cooking eggs and bird meat. It is an important issue for our South West of England farmers since we supply 16% of UK poultry production. Our three hens eye me nervously each morning.

 

Farmers in the South West are also very angry about the increasing volume of cheap Brazilian beef coming into the EU. I had a chance to follow this up this month at the HQ of the EU’s Food and Veterinary Inspectorate outside Dublin. I learned that foot and mouth disease has been found in three of Brazil’s states and exports from there have been banned. Meanwhile all Brazilian beef exported to Europe comes from animals that must have been vaccinated against foot and mouth. This is very curious. At the time of the British foot and mouth outbreak I can well remember the NFU chairman arguing that British consumers would not eat meat from vaccinated animals. Opposition to vaccination from the supermarkets was said to be one of the reasons why we went for mass slaughter to eradicate the disease. Now cheapness dictates that we are importing meat from vaccinated animals. I am also uneasy about the EU’s capacity to ensure that the meat coming to us does not come from one of the infected regions. To check on this we only send six inspectors three times a year for two weeks - to states the size of France.

 

We voted through the first round of the 2006 budget this month. Overall it was a more satisfactory package than previous years, with more funding devoted to budget lines like research which will enable the EU to be more competitive. We failed by only a narrow margin to torpedo subsidies for tobacco production – a   long-standing scandal unless you are a small Greek tobacco farmer with no alternative crop. We protested against but could not stop a budget line to “inform the public about the work of the Convention and its conclusions”. I hope the public are also to be informed about the fate of those conclusions, which was highly publicised rejection in two states.

 

Bulgaria and Romania are due to join the EU on 1 January 2007 but the Commissioner in charge of enlargement reported to MEPs this month that all is not going well and that this date may not be met. The trouble is that although they are busily implementing past EU directives, they are not getting a grip on corruption and organised crime, nor are their judges deemed sufficiently independent. The Commission may therefore recommend postponement of accession unless things improve between now and May.

 

In Committee we voted through over 1000 amendments on the draft Regulation on the registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (known as REACH) this month. We and the Council of Ministers are converging on a workable compromise which should not involve undue bureaucracy while focussing attention on the most dangerous chemicals and minimising the use of animals in the necessary experiments to test the chemicals. The Germans remain utterly opposed to the proposal and I have some sympathy for them because I can see a bureaucratic monster looming.

 

I visited a waste treatment site in Flanders this month. All the waste is taken in and out by road. It does have an alternative - a special dock built to enable the waste to be transported by canal, a better alternative environmentally. But the Antwerp port trade union insists that the dock can only operate with 4 of their members constantly present. For a lot of the time they would have nothing to do so the operators have rejected the idea of using the canal route and everything continues to go by road. We should be grateful that the Thatcher revolution weakened the power of the unions and stopped this kind of nonsense in Britain

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Caroline Jackson MEP