online diary of Richard Corbett MEP

August 2004

(No blog during four-week Parliamentary recess)

Monday 30 August

Parliamentary duties resume. We MEPs have a far shorter recess than our Westminster colleagues and here I am already back in Brussels – and it's still August!

Last week was already one to catch up on constituency duties and a mountain of correspondence – it soon piles up if you leave the office unattended even for a couple of weeks.

Today, the first day at my Parliamentary office in Brussels, I catch up with letters and meet a visiting delegation from the Japanese Parliament: Socialist MPs and trade unionists.

In the evening I am invited to a presentation of one of the first academic books on the proposed new European constitution. Lynn Dobson from Edinburgh University and Andreas Føllesdal from Norway present their analysis of the proposed constitution. It seems that academics from different schools of thought at least agree that the new constitution is an improvement on the old one, both from the perspective of the efficiency of the EU institutions and as regards their democratic accountability – even if there is such divergence as to whether they think the new constitution is significant or not.

Tuesday 31 August

Entirely a day for catching up on paperwork.