THE HONEYBALL BUZZ

The past few weeks have seen more European coverage in the British media than I have seen for a long time.  Given this,  I was pleased to be invited to talk to the General Committee of Feltham and Heston Labour Party yesterday.  I am always happy to go to GC meetings and other Labour Party events as it is all too easy as an MEP elected on a regional basis to become removed from Party members and activists.  This isn’t helped by being in Brussels and Strasbourg during the week.  So it was good to talk to a local Labour Party and I am pictured with Constituency Secretary Shantanu Rajawat .

As you may expect with Europe so much in the news, we had a good discussion.  Tony Blair’s candidacy for the position of President of the European Council was well up the agenda as was the strange and unfathomable decision by the Tories in the European Parliament to leave the moderate centre-right political group to set up their own group, the European Conservatives and Reformists.  As I have blogged before, the Tories’ partners in Europe are a rag-bag of unsavoury, ultra-right parties, including the homophobic Polish Law and Justice Party and their Latvian allies who celebrate the Waffen SS, not to mention the Belgian Lijst Dedecker who have strong links to the Vlams Belang, the Belgian equivalent of the BNP.  As if this were not enough, we know that both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, are deeply concerned that the British Conservatives, whom they view as their natural allies, have aligned themselves with political groups on the fringes of European politics.

The meeting also expressed its total hostility to the BNP in a lively discussion.  The general view was the although Nick Griffin had done himself more harm than good on “Question Time” we need to be vigilant against the BNP and work out policies to defeat them.  I explained that in the European Parliament Mr Griffin has excelled himself by making a spirited and completely erroneous denial of climate change.

Chris Bryant, our new Minister for Europe, has arrived at a most interesting.  Very best wishes to Chris in his new role, which, as a former Chair of the Labour Movement for Europe,  I know he will carry out well.  Labour MEPs look forward to seeing you in Brussels/Strasbourg very soon.