Graham Watson MEP

Graham's blog Friday 24th September 2011

Greetings

The Polish city of Wroclaw has seen a flood of ministers from the EU member states in recent days. Last Friday the 27 EU finance ministers, this Monday and Tuesday the Council of Energy Ministers and now the Defence Ministers. Poland currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council and is using it to full effect. Which is perhaps just as well, for while I was in Birmingham at the Liberal Democrats' party conference on Monday, the three major Brussels institutions were shut down by an electricity outage caused by a fire at a sub-station.

The finance ministers discussed the euro crisis and gave a somewhat frosty welcome to US treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who had invited himself out of concern for the impact on the US dollar of China switching its investment to euros. On Tuesday the ministers agreed with the European Parliament on a new mechanism to penalize any eurozone country infringing the Growth and Stability Pact in future. On Wednesday the Commission announced a plan to invest € 15 bn from the EU's structural funds in 100 projects across the 13 regions of Greece over the next two years and will look at funding guarantees for small business. Portugal discovered that the island of Madeira has a hole of more than a billion euros in its accounts. But another week has gone by, the euro still exists and is stronger today against both the dollar and sterling than it was last Friday.

The energy ministers were concerned to learn of Poland's plan to drill into an estimated 5,300 billion cubic metres of shale gas, having already started hydraulic fracturing of the deposits in Silesia. The Poles want to be independent of the Russians by 2035 and promise to meet their climate obligations by 2020. Others worry about the impact on climate change from a process which is believed to speed up global warming. Indeed, Commission President Barroso was in New York on Wednesday for a dialogue on climate change at the UN General Assembly and called for a Durban agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol which would be backed by all major emitters.

Agriculture ministers are still arguing about the 440,000 tonnes of food aid which are given to 18 million people across 20 EU member states. The UK and five other states want to abandon the programme following an ECJ judgment in April against the use of the EU budget to buy food for distribution. In some years, however, the food is in any case surplus agricultural production and France and other producer countries want their farmers paid for it.

Parliament welcomed the Commission's proposals for a revision of the Schengen rules to deal with migrants. Violence on the Italian island of Lampedusa on Wednesday between Tunisian migrants kept in poor conditions and the local police highlighted once again the challenge. But populist pressures in the EU continue to be felt: Finland and the Netherlands, both countries with strong right wing anti-immigrant parties, vetoed an extension of the Schengen visa free area to Romania and Bulgaria citing concerns about corruption and organised crime.

I was pleased to see the Commission impose anti-dumping duties on Chinese manufacturers of ceramic tiles after I and others had raised concerns flagged up to us by companies such as the British Ceramic Tile Co in Newton Abbott.

I was also pleased to receive two former foreign ministers who I had met in that capacity: Arseiy Yatseniuk is now leading Ukrainian opposition party Zmin and Joao Cravinho of Portugal has been appointed as the EU's next Ambassador to New Delhi.

Parliament meets again in Strasbourg next week, where we debate inter alia the situation in the Middle East and the dispute between Turkey and Cyprus over oil drilling in the Mediterranean.

Regards

Graham