The People's Republic of South Devon

Graham Watson MEP has been in Brussels where he’s pondered appointments, campaigned against climate change and scratched his head over scanners at airports – apparently, there’s no evidence a scanner would have caught the Christmas Day (or Pants) bomber… but maybe being tipped off would have helped. Take it away Graham…

The European Parliament’s year kicked off with a series of ‘hearings’ in Brussels this week of the persons designated to be members of the new European Commission.

One of them, Rumiana Jeleva of Bulgaria, was given a rough ride and may fail to be approved. She was a MEP in the last parliament and since earlier this year has been her country’s foreign minister; but we were not much impressed by her and there are serious doubts about whether she has been honest in her declaration of financial interests. My sense is that MEPs are not looking for a fight with the Council of Ministers about who the 27 governments have nominated, but being a European Commissioner is a prestigious and well-paid job carrying serious responsibility and we are not gong to allow them to appoint monkeys.

Climate change still dominates much of our thinking.

Energy and environment ministers are meeting in Seville this weekend (Spain currently holds the Presidency of the EU) to discuss the follow up to Copenhagen. I met the Commission’s chief climate change negotiator, Artur Runtge-Metzger, for supper on Monday [January, 11] together with five other MEPs and some business leaders to learn his views. The Commissioner-designate for energy policy, Gunter Oettinger, performed well at his hearing this week, commiting to make energy efficiency and the promotion of renewables his priorities and to strive to reach the EU’s 20-20-20 goal (20 per cent of energy to come from renewables, 20 per cent reduction of energy consumption and a 20 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions, all by the year 2020). The Commissioner designate for climate change, Denmark’s Connie Hedegaard, also acquitted herself well.

The new full-time President of the European Council (the body in which the 27 member state governments are represented, which is the other ‘house’ of parliament) managed to put a dampener on things by saying in his video-blog that the outcome from Copenhagen was not bad. His video-blog itself [take a gander below] is clearly just a series of performances at press conferences thrown together by his private office – it does him no favours.

Herman Van Rompuy with Jean-Pierre Raffarin from council_of_the_eu on Vimeo.

Haiti will occupy new EU foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton.

She has called an emergency meeting of development aid ministers for Monday. The EU has already released three million euros in initial emergency aid. As the world’s largest aid donor by far it had already planned EUR 28 million in humanitarian aid for Haiti in 2010. Far more will now be needed. Thankfully, the EU is better at providing aid than it once was. When Albania was hit be severe flooding over New Year five EU member states immediately came to its aid with pumps, boats and personnel provided through the Union’s ‘civil protection mechanism’ which co-ordinates such operations.

The failed Christmas Day airliner bomb attempt has also occupied us.

Last autumn the Commission withdrew a proposal on body-scanners because of MEPs’ objections on grounds of efficiency, privacy and data protection. However, there is nothing to stop member states going ahead with their own regulations, as a number are now doing. The irony is that there is no evidence a scanner would have detected the explosives which the would-be bomber was carrying. The Spanish Presidency has pledged to make fighting terrorism one of its priorities during its six month term of office. But the most bizarre story, which the Commission is now investigating, is the planting by the Slovak authorities of 90 grammes of RDX, a military explosive, in the suitcase of on an unsuspecting airline passenger bound for Dublin on Saturday, January 2 ‘to test security systems’. Slovakia’s chief of border police has already resigned.

Next week we are in Strasbourg, where we will debate inter alia the need for procedural guarantees in criminal legal proceedings. If I am called to speak I will raise the cases of  Michael McGoldrick and Jason Turner, constituents of mine awaiting trial in Hungary on fraud charges. There is no evidence of anything awry with the legal procedures, but I am trying to make sure their trial takes place as soon as possible.

I’ll write again from Strasbourg next week.

• Graham Watson the Lib Dem MP for the South West and is just one of your six South West MEPs

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

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “For every service there are a group of passionate advocates and, no doubt, an enthusiastic councillor to defend the senseless cuts. But for every reprieved service, another must be cut or the funds in the bank run perilously close to zero." Exeter City Council leader Cllr Adrian Fullam on budget cuts in the Express and Echo

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