Immigration on top of the agenda in Europe

By PRSD, on Friday, April 29, 2011

South West MEP Graham Watson: a week in Europe that dealt with carbon emissions, imigration and a new gallaxy, billions of light years away

I took a week’s break last week to coincide with the UK school holidays (and sailed a small boat along the north coast of Spain with my 15 year old son), so this week I was back to Brussels for meetings and dealing with parliamentary correspondence. I made it a short week, however, so that I could canvass in Bath (Monday morning), Taunton (Thursday evening) and Torbay (Friday) for the local elections and AV referendum.

The European Commission this week agreed on proposals for allocating carbon emission allowances for industry, to be based on the average emissions from the best 10% of factories in each sector. There are still huge challenges in regulating emissions, however. Only last week did Lithuania get its emissions trading system back online after a cyber attack some weeks ago which saw permits stolen in a number of countries.

The main subject of debate in Brussels has been immigration. Sarkozy and Berlusconi held a meeting at which they agreed to call dramatically, in a letter to Commission President Barroso, for a change to the Schengen rules to deal with the influx of African refugees on the island of Lampedusa.

This was a cynical move designed to appease anti-immigrant sentiment: there is already plenty of flexibility in the Schengen Convention to allow member states to deal with exceptional circumstances. Nonetheless the Commission has said it will make a statement next Wednesday to clarify the interpretation of the so-called ‘safeguard clause’ and to seek to improve co-ordination between the border authorities of the member states.

Parliament has discussed new rules on labelling of both foodstuffs and textiles. On the former we agreed last week to seek tougher rules than the national governments want. In particular to mention the country of origin of meat, fish, dairy and other fresh produce to allow shoppers to make informed choices. On the latter we agree with national government ministers in Council and will almost certainly vote to approve next month the proposal steered through the House by my Dutch LD colleague Toine Manders MEP.

Events in North Africa have continued to occupy the minds of policy makers. In Tunisia things are going well: the country has agreed to hold elections under a PR system with parity of representation of each gender.

In Egypt progress is less clear, nd there is not a single woman on the body set up to draft a new constitution. Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy supremo, secured the support of the Gulf States on a plan to bring democracy to Yemen. And member state representatives in the Political and Security Committee (normally the Ambassadors to Brussels or their deputies) will meet tomorrow afternoon to discuss Syria after the EU’s failure to secure a UNSC Resolution.

Two recent scientific discoveries pioneered by EU funding are worth a mention. The discovery of a new galaxy 13 billion light years away by a team funded through the Marie Curie Fund, and the discovery by EU-funded medical teams in labs in the UK and France that anti-cancer drugs can kill the parasite which causes malaria, which infects 225 million people worldwide and kills 800,000 every year.

The UK is among 10 countries ordered by the Commission to recover CAP grants after discoveries of irregularities in spending. We are not the worst offender; but it shows once again that the campaign against fraud or lax spending of taxpayers’ money yields results.

I recorded a piece for BBC TV Bristol’s Points West on next week’s local elections which will be broadcast at 6.30 pm this evening: I also feature in this week’s edition of ‘The Record: Europe’ (Saturday, 11pm, BBC Parliament), talking about the challenge of migration.

I’ll be out canvassing again on Monday, in Bristol, before travelling to Brussels next week.

(image of Graham Watson by Salty1977 under the Creative Commons)