Blackpool Battle

Written by Andrew Duff MEP and published in Liberal Democrat News on Fri 9th Sep 2005

This year's Europe motion for debate at the Blackpool conference is more than usually disappointing. The conference committee, for undisclosed reasons, has preferred a draft resolution of the federal policy committee to be moved by Westminster MPs to one submitted by MEPs. Titled, a tad presumptuously, The Future for Europe, the Westminster motion notes the difficulties into which the Constitution has run but has no positive message about why or how to salvage it. It calls, instead, for selective reforms that do not need a treaty change: but it finds only one more transparency in the Council, to be achieved by a change in ministerial rules of procedure. The motion sticks doggedly to holding a UK referendum despite the obvious unsuitability of that simplistic device for deciding complex constitutional questions.

The government is criticised for not putting forward proposals on CAP reform, but the motion signally fails to advance any practical reform itself. Worse, conference will be asked to support maintaining a cap of 1 per cent of GNI on EU spending for the next seven years, regardless of political purpose. Embarrassingly, today's ceiling stands at 1.24 per cent, and a cut of such savagery as the party's establishment proposes would mean the certain end of all EU social policy, regional development and R&D financing in the UK. One may wonder why the Liberal Democrats are made to support Gordon Brown's policy. Conference representatives who care for the European dimension of regional and local government should join MEPs in voting against such undesirable and unnecessary retrenchment.

A highly bizarre paragraph urges 'stronger application of the EU's subsidiarity principle so that decisions are made by national governments or parliaments or at the most local effective level'. The role of the EU legislator Council and Parliament is nowhere referred to. (Indeed, the motion completely ignores all the EU institutions.) All in all, we have before us a scrappy, ill-informed and reactionary motion on Europe which will neither enhance the party's reputation nor contribute anything of note to the EU's 'period of reflection'. If it cannot be much amended, it should be chucked out.