Euro-Med Free Trade

8.00 The UK Lb Dem breakfast meeting. We update among ourselves on various issues including the latest on the Kashmir compromises, although we have a special meeting on that on Thursday morning. The rest of the time is taken up with discussing a new staff appointment.

9.00 Back to the office to continue work on Audio Visual Media and football. There do not seem to be many problems with votes today. We send the football amendments off to the Group.

11.30 Interview with three counties radio on the new EU network combating scams. This was as a result of a press release last week. Did two interviews on this, one last week as well.

12.00 Votes.

13.00 Back to the office and amendments.

15.00 Meeting with Lloyds on Solvency ll. They were also at the hearing last week so we discuss the possible different approaches of regulators. I wonder whether capital retention within member states has anything to do with it.

16.00 Meeting with Bertelsmann AG on the Zingoretti report.

17.00 Meeting with other rapporteurs/shadows and Commissioner Reding on the state of play. I bring up advertising time and short news issues. The advertising issue we will have to fight out but the point I make on short news look to be understood.

18:30 Back to the office and grab papers ready for the Group meeting Saj’s assistant alerts me to a problem with amendments on the Euro-Med free trade area paper. This is all to do with if services are opened up, should the EU be more generous and allow some asymmetry. I look at it and it seems possible to get the best of both worlds by splitting the EPP amendment in question and then changing one word in the residual part of the paragraph so that options for opening the EU market asymmetrically will be looked at. Saj's assistant goes off to let our shadow rapporteur know.

19.00 Group meeting. We deal among other things with the Euro-Med free trade. My amendment proposal is agreed. We then move on to a discussion of the mobile phone roaming regulation. We are all in agreement that a market has not been established and so there needs to be wholesale regulation but we are divided on whether retail regulation is necessary. Those who have worked on the dossier agree some king of retail cap price is needed and those who have not specialised in it and are following liberal instinct do not want it. This is quite useful for making us justify our case. We run out of time so the discussi