Donnici, Group and Labour Law

8.30 LDEPP. Nothing special.

9.00 I go to working Group for the discussion on excise duty. We agree to have three different voting lines. This is going to make my life as Lib Dem whip a little more complicated.

9.30 Back to my office. Meetings this morning that were scheduled on the audio visual media service have been cancelled as a deal has been reached, so I am able to continue work on amendments of labour law, for which I have just realised I am the shadow! I thought I was just poking my nose in again. Then I start work on my report on the establishment of a statistics board that is due in tomorrow. I have already made lots of notes so it is really a matter of joining them up and deciding on amendments.

10.30 Group. We have been organising proxy votes again to support Andrew Duff on a couple of amendments to do with institutional provisions and holding an intergovernmental conference. The suggestion is made that there seem to be two lines (to have the conferences or not) and the shadow suggests a free vote, but confident in our fire power Andrew presses for a vote to establish our line to have the conferences, which we duly win.

We also discuss the French elections and the moving on the war monument in Estonia and the retaliatory attacks on the Estonian Embassy and whether this should influence our support for the EU Russia summit. We agree that our line should be that the summit should be postponed, and so we will withdraw from the joint resolution in consequence. [After group I send an email indicating one section in the resolution that I am not happy with and I propose an oral amendment, but as we are withdrawing they suggest we would not succeed. We then eventually abstain on the final vote, so actually I would have preferred my amendment].

We also discuss the ongoing saga of the ‘approval of credentials’ of our new member Donnici. There was a second meeting last Thursday at which the matter was pushed to a vote. Graham was there and was kept waiting over an hour to speak and felt that the chair just hung about until he had all the EPP voters there. I suppose he was after numbers, given that only four (including our two votes) voted in favour. I spoke indicating what a travesty I thought the process was and that I thought it brought the Parliament into disrepute. It will certainly end up in the ECJ. I think the words that Poettering used when he announced Donnici in plenary somehow forecast that.

12.30 Back to the office and more work on the statistics board report.

15.30 I have a meeting in the ‘Mickey Mouse’ bar with a group of Barclays people over for briefings and the opening of their new office. Before they arrive I have time for a brief chat with the Pakistani Ambassador and some Pakistan Parliamentarians who are visiting because of the Kashmir report. They thank me for my work. With Barclays we run through the various live ECON issues.

16.15 Return to work on my report and get so carried away with it that I forget to go to the reception for the opening of the Barclay’s Brussels office. Go back to the flat at about 8.30.