Fighting unscrupulous employers and other issues this week
April 20th, 2012
The European Commission published annual reports on Monday on progress in gender equality and on the impact of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both can be found on the excellent europa website, www.europa.eu, as can the Commission’s updated economic growth strategy Towards a job-rich recovery, which Parliament debated with Barroso on Wednesday. The situation is grim; since 2008 some six million people have lost their jobs. Among other schemes to help people find jobs, Youth Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou (LD, Cyprus) announced that the EU will fund 130,000 job placements this year for young people wishing to work in other EU countries.
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Aviation matters were prominent among our concerns this week. The EU’s imposition on 1 January of an emissions fee on airlines flying into and out of European airspace is still under attack elsewhere; the USA lost an appeal to the European Court of Justice against the measure: China has prohibited its airlines from paying the fee (and is whispering about putting on hold a large order for EU Airbus aeroplanes); and now India threatens to instruct its air carriers not to comply and says this move could put in jeopardy the climate agreement reached in Durban. 
Parliament has been officially in recess this week and does not start back until next Tuesday. But I was in Gibraltar on Monday, where the new Socialist-Liberal coalition invited me to address a meeting of their cabinet and I paid a courtesy call on the Governor. Back in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday I caught up with correspondence, met the new Chinese Ambassador to the EU, called a meeting of the Political Unit at ELDR Party HQ to review progress in party building and gave interviews to Wessex FM (on Spanish retail scams), Cyprus television (on their recent Cabinet reshuffle in which the Liberal Democrat member was discracefully forced out) and French TV (on EU-Africa co-operation).
There is so much to report this week it is hard to know where to start. On Monday, while I was visiting Riga to address a conference on the sovereign debt crisis, the Presidents of the EU Council and the European Commission were in Seoul for the nuclear security summit (why both needed to be there escapes me and may owe something to the dismal competition between them), the foreign affairs ministers met in Brussels to do battle over the EU’s budget for the period 2013-20 (a debate which has been engaged but which will not be resolved for at least eight months) and members of the European Parliament’s transport committe were giving Commissioner Siim Kallas (Estonia, LD) an earfull over a reinterpretation by his legal services of the provisions governing HGV’s which would allow longer and heavier lorries (”gigaliners”) on our roads without explicit parliamentary approval.
In the absence of a new world trade agreement, which seems continuously to elude our negotiators at the WTO, attention in Brussels is focussing on bilateral trade agreements which would stimulate trade and therefore growth and jobs. The 27 trade ministers agreed last Friday to sign free trade agreements with Peru and Colombia which they initialled a year ago. These now come to the European Parliament for approval. Discussions continue with Singapore and Malaysia. And the European Commission and the US Administration met on Monday to try to overcome barriers to greater transatlantic trade. Yet at the same time some member states, led by France, have managed to force onto the EU’s agenda a proposal to twist the arms of all trading partners into giving the EU the same degree of access to their public procurement markets as they have to ours. The Commission published a draft regulation on Wednesday despite the opposition of most Liberal Commissioners and the concerns of the lawyers that this is a protectionist measure and would fall foul of WTO rules.
I flew to Strasbourg on Monday for a busy parliamentary week under glorious springtime sunshine. We voted inter alia to support Commissioner Reding’s proposal to legislate for quotas for women on company boards (targets 30% by 2015 and 40% by 2020) and called for quotas to increase their representation on elected assemblies; and we set an EU goal to reduce the wage gap between men and women by 10%.
The week kicked off with cross-party condemnation of the rigged Presidential election in Russia. Parliament’s Liberal Group hosted a conference at which Pawel Khodorkovsky, son of jailed tycoon Mikhail, came to speak. Our Group leader Guy Verhofstadt had been in Russia on Monday for the elections.
On Tuesday I was in Warsaw in my capacity as leader of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party to meet Janusz Palikot, the Leader of a new radical liberal movement which took 10% of the vote in last autumn’s elections. These last three days have been spent back in Brussels, where the situation in Greece and revival of Europe’s economy continue to dominate our concerns.
The European Parliament met in Strasbourg this week. In a vote on next year’s budget we called for a single seat for the European Parliament, to cut operating costs. Our vote will not make a crucial difference but is yet another sign that we are gradually winning the campaign. Until recently, such a move would have been defeated.
On Monday the governments of France and Germany held a joint cabinet meeting. This was not the first such occasion, but to give an idea of the extent to which they are committed to closer union, they discussed a plan to harmonise company taxation by 1 January next year. The Green Paper prepared by their civil servants recommends cutting company taxes but extending the tax base, or widening the taxman’s net. I am pleased to report that the UK and German governments will hold a joint cabinet meeting shortly, which I believe will be a first, but I doubt any plan of such nature will be on the agenda. 
