Please find below the latest newsletter from Graham Watson, our Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament for South West England and Gibraltar:

Greetings

I made an error in last week’s blog, for which I apologise: Luxembourg’s prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker is no longer also finance minister. He ceded the role to political ally and former justice minister Luc Frieden at the end of July last year, but I had missed it. (Government reshuffles in Luxembourg don’t always hit the headlines.)

Parliament has been very quiet again this week. In the foreign affairs committee we heard from Madeleine Albright of the USA about the reform of NATO and from Serge Brammertz, Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, about prosecutions of war criminals and the need for more resources for his work. We also voted to recommend to the full house the opening of EU accession talks with Macedonia, to propose finishing this year the talks with Croatia (now almost ready to join the EU) and to tell Turkey to pull its socks up. Greece this week proposed 2014 (the 100th anniversary of the murder of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which led to the first world war) as the target date for all the western Balkans countries to join the EU. Few others think it realistic, but the EU is to meet the five countries concerned – Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro – in Sarajevo at the end of May to review progress.

Our development committee heard from EU development aid Commissioner Karel de Gucht (Belgian Liberal) about his visit to Haiti, where the UN, the World Bank, the US, the EU and others have agreed to call an international donor conference in March to extract pledges of support for the massive task of rebuilding of the country.

Having reached 2010, the date by which the EU’s Lisbon strategy was due to have made it ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ (a pledge made by all the prime ministers in 2000), our leaders need a new target to aim for. Thus they now talk of the EU’s 2020 strategy. The components of the two are remarkably similar. Perhaps 2020 suggest more vision. It is not the vision which is lacking, however; more the plan of how to get there.

Hungary and Latvia, which had to be bailed out by their EU partners after last year’s financial crisis, have both taken measures to bring down their government deficits and were given a pat on the head this week by Commissioner Almunia. And I am pleased to say that in a rather more modest way the county of Somerset was held up as an example of how to move to more sustainable and less polluting transport through its bio-ethanol car fleet scheme, which I brought the Agriculture Commissioner to the county to inspect a few years ago.

Parliament and Council are still at loggerheads over the practice of transferring EU citizens’ bank account details to the US government through the inter-bank network to help fight terrorism. In an interim agreement, to run from February to October, member state governments implicitly recognise that what they are doing breaks data protection laws and that new provisions will be needed from October.

I will speak to students in Gloucester this morning and to Lib Dems in Tewkesbury this evening. In between I’ll be out leafleting to persuade people of the merits of the EU. If you’d like to come and join me, we meet at the Northway Pub in Northway, Tewkesbury (GL20 8HQ) at 3.30 pm.

Regards

Graham
Graham Watson MEP
Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament for South West England and Gibraltar