Some interesting links

I took part in this week's Record Europe in which we discuss the relationship between sport and the European law. You can catch in on the BBC Parliament's channel or watch it on the internet here. The debate starts just under five minutes into the programme.

Another link well worth taking a look at is Nosemonkey's EUtopia post on the media and why he thinks that he was shortlisted for UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Award for his blog on the EU. Far from being chuffed with being up for the award Nosemonkey worries he was shortlisted because of the distinct lack of any journalism from the major papers on the EU. It's a thoughtful piece that all too easily highlights the UK media's weakness of reporting the EU and the ignorence this then leads to.

Two other bloggers, Jon Worth and Jan Seifert, have set up a website which is campaigning for just one president of the EU, called Who Do I Call, in tribute to Henry Kissinger's infamous question "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?". It's online at www.whodoicall.eu and argues that appointing the same person to be President of the Commission and President of the European Council would offer greater democracy and efficiency while obviously offering one clear figurehead of the EU to the rest of the world.

Someone has created a fake of my blog!

Following a Google Alert I was very surprised to find a replica of my blog, that someone has bizarrely gone to a lot of trouble making.

Quite who is behind this hoax is a complete mystery but I thought I should make it quite clear I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Anyone who is a regular reader of my blog will be aware that www.richardcorbett.org.uk/blog is the real address and I trust anyone who has been fooled by this will ensure their links lead to www.richardcorbett.org.uk/blog

Thanks!

Lords of the Blog

A new collaborative blog site has been launched by the House of Lords, which is called 'Lords of the Blog' and is written by Members of the House of Lords (obviously). Its aim is to increase public engagement and it should certainly offer an interesting insight into the House of Lords.

For those of you interested in political blogs this I'm sure will make for interesting reading with Lords such as Labour Lords Soley and Lipsey amongst the many contributors.

The six-month project states:
"Find out why Lord Tyler decries the myth of a golden age of political reporting; Baroness D’Souza’s definition of a crossbencher and what Lord Norton has to say about Iain Dale’s request for nominations for the most fanciable political journalists."

The blog can be found at: www.lordsoftheblog.net

UKIP bloggers rattled

I was alerted to a couple of blog sites run by UKIP officials, who seem to devote a surprising amount of time to rebutting the material I post here. In particular, England Expects, responding to this flippant piece I did joking that veteran Danish Eurosceptic Jens-Peter Bonde had come out in favour of the Lisbon Treaty, posted this detailed rebuttal.

If they think it worth taking so much trouble to monitor my blog and to try to rebut it, then they must think it is having an effect, which I will take as a compliment.

All this week I will be debating Britain and the EU with Neil O'Brien of Open Europe on the Economist's website.

You can follow the debate by clicking here.

I have also had a column published on the Guardian's Comment Is Free website, which is particularly relevant to this week's TUC conference. You can read it by clicking here.

I was pleased to see that my website and blog has been nominated for a New Statesman New Media Award in the elected representative catergory.

It's nice to see people acknowledging the site as a lot of work goes into expanding and updating it. It is also an effective method of communicating with constituents and informing them of my activities.

With such a vast constituency it is impossible to see as many constituents as I would like but the website and blog attracts over 900 unique visitors a week. There is obviously no substitute for meeting people in person but I am able to communicate with far more people in the region through my website than I possible could only with visits, talks and meetings.

Constituents for their part are also embracing the use of the internet. The past couple of years has seen a considerable rise in email queries, with sites like www.writetothem.com making contacting a politician effortless. The internet has also made it far easier to organise a concerted campaign, with people able to publish a stock letter on their website which others can print off and send to their MEP or MP - though this is sometimes a problem when I get 600 identical emails!

With all the talk about wide spread apathy towards politics it is heartening to see the internet enable so many more people to be involved in democracy.

This blog is one of the top ten European blogs, according to an evaluation co-ordinated by Craig Winniker of the Wall Street Journal and published by E Sharp magazine this month.

In fact, I come in 6th place, three behind Margot Wallstrom's famous blog and just ahead of a eurosceptic blog Eurosoc. Their evaluation of my blog is that "between reading all the fun and frivolous blogs it's worth while checking out something as sober and sincere as MEP Richard Corbett's …… Refreshingly Corbett's is among the least self-promoting of the meagre crop of MEP blogs".

Well, most of the time!

I am apparently "hot"! No, it’s not hoards of admirers desperate to learn more about comitology who have proclaimed this but the Open Europe blog.

Out of the 78 British MEPs I apparently rank a heady fourth in terms of media exposure, behind Tory rebel Roger Helmer, Green party national spokesperson Caroline Lucas and Lib Dem leader Graham Watson.

It was no surprise to see Helmer top of the chart, as he features daily in the letters page of each of his local papers, with the furore over his losing the Tory whip ensuring the right-wing broadsheets gave him plenty of coverage throughout the year.

Likewise, you would expect to see Lucas riding high when she is the national spokesperson for the Greens at a time when the environment is one of the key issues in British, European and world politics.

And Graham Watson has the whole press office of the pan-European group Alliance of Lberals & Democrats in Europe behind him as their leader.

But me? As the Open Europe blog itself admits, its methodology is not exactly fullproof but it is certainly better than coming last! The part of their calculation based on google hits (nearly a quarter of a million) even puts me first out of all UK MEPs - possibly helped by my website, or my newly revovated, expanding and informative website, as I should say.

So, Labour Conference over, and I hope you enjoyed looking at Jonathon Roberts's blog.

Another Parliament week over too, so I only saw Tony Blair's speech on TV from Strasbourg - but what a performance!

Yesterday, I was interviewed by the "p.m." programme on BBC Radio 4, on what I thought of the absence of much debate on Europe at the Conference, something Commissioner Wallstrom had commented on in her blog. Questions soon centered on Gordon Brown's speech - a very good speech, but with no mention of Europe.

Even when he said he was proud to be Scottish and British, he didn't add "and European", which would have been particularly appropriate the day after Europe's Ryder Cup triumph in a sport that was invented, after all, in Scotland!

Does he want to keep quiet on his European policy? Or does he think it not important? Or is he still pondering on it? Who knows. It certainly contrasted with the view of one of his closest confidents, Ed Balls, who in a fringe meeting said Britain's constructive engagement with the rest of Europe was the most important issue facing us over the next decade.

David Milliband too was a powerful advocate of acting at European level - not surprising as he is minister for an issue on which national action alone is less useful, namely the environment. He said that, in peoples minds, the letters "EU" should stand for "Environmental Union".

There were in all a dozen fringe meetings on Europe at party conference, with just one Eurosceptical one from the "common market safeguards campaign", a throwback to the 1970s. Whatever the detailed views of Gordon Brown turn out to be, the party as a whole remains pretty committed to Europe - an improved and enlarged EU, of course, but not an unravelled one.

Party Conference has an unusual atmosphere: the first time in years
that it's not at a seaside resort!

I will not blog on the Conference, as I am off to Strasbourg Tuesday,
but refer readers instead to the blog of Jonathon Roberts, executive member of the LME. Jonathan, 24 years old, works in my office and he won a competition to be the official Labour Conference blogger. He has done a blog for his CLP, Thirsk + Malton, and his Conference blog will, I'm sure, be equally frank and entertaining.

More coverage of yesterday's blogging debate is now on Parliament's website.

The curiously named ‘Nosemonkey’, a pro-EU blogger and freelance journalist who is kind enough to link to me now and then, wrote a while ago on how, in his words, “Europe” (or, specifically, the new constitution) “is not ambitious enough”:

“The Treaty of Rome covered just six nations, yet each required opt-outs for varous clauses. The same has been the case with most subsequent treaties. Now that the Union has expanded to 25 members - including a number which have yet to recover from their decades of poverty and pillage under Soviet rule - how can anyone think that a ‘one size fits all’ approach is the way forwards?

“The coming of the Eurozone is the ultimate proof that the EU can function without everyone participating in exactly the same way. Why did the Convention which drew up this constitution not notice that?

“If some EU states want to push ahead with political integration, and turn into the federal superstate of eurosceptic myth, why shouldn’t they? There’s no real practical reason why they have to take less keen nations along with them. So why can’t there be an ‘A-list’ membership, with various affiliate members at lesser stages of integration scattered around the edges?”

Unusually for this blogger, Nosemonkey appears not to be aware of the significant new chunks of the constitution which provide for exactly that kind of multi-layered integration. How about the improved ‘enhanced co-operation’ provisions, which make it easier for groups of countries voluntarily to integrate more closely without upsetting other countries who would prefer not to do so? How about the new ‘emergency brake’ formula, which in many cases allows a country to opt out entirely of a new measure about which it has serious doubts?

In fact, that’s often how the EU works. There are always minimum standards and basic levels of co-operation which all members agree to adhere to, but beyond that, countries are free to go their own way. Underlying this is the principle of proportionality: action taken at EU level should be no greater than the minimum required to achieve agreed joint objectives.