Bluemerle

I lifted this from the Guardian BB and found it very interesting, particularly as Geoffrey Titford spoke. The writer is not a member of UKIP.
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My wife used (till she became too busy) to distribute leaflets for the Lib-Dems; she never reads the leaflets herself, but I do usually, even though I regard Lib-Dems as verging on barmy. Earlier this year I saw that the Lib-Dem MEP for the East Midlands Euro-constituency was organising a subsidised visit to the European Parliament - interested parties contact...

So I contacted... and paid our fee, £145 each inclusive of coach-travel, 2 nights' B&B in a good Brussels hotel, and 3-course evening meal after the EP visit, which wasn't unreasonable, I thought. But let no-one say that I'm not serious about this EU thing.

Last week was "it". A coach took 35 schooldkids from a variety of East Midlands' schools, a group of U3A "students" and two independent couples, one of which was us, to Brussels. A well organised trip. Caught up on a lot of reading.

We spent Thursday at the EP: an hour in the plenary session first, then talks from the "Visitors' Team" (a basic guide to the EU institutions, seemed to be new to most of our party, but covering little not hammered out over the years on this forum), from two separate Lib-Dem MEPs (one merely answered our questions for an hour, the other argued his case for accepting Turkey's application), and from an NGO lobbyist in Brussels. Somewhere in the middle was lunch in the EP visitors' café. I think the kids were a bit shell-shocked by the end, but most of the adults found it interesting.

During our hour in the plenary session, the initial debate was on urban regeneration, a debate of mind-numbing... (what's the opposite of intensity?) ... but seeing the displays of who was speaking and the timers monitoring the speakers' 2-minute slots was quite interesting. But eventually, bored, I took off the headphones & browsed through some of the literature I'd picked up. After a while, I became aware that the speaker was using English & was talking about fishing (my wife said afterwards, "Didn't you know the subject had changed? Didn't you hear the 5-minute summing up of the first debate?" to which I could only answer "No" to both) Anyway, I listened to the speaker and decided he made a great deal of sense (details below). Almost immediately, our hour was up & we were turfed out of the visitors' gallery.

After lunch, to our surprise, we were handed the subsidy (which I had thought had been included in the price - perhaps I should have read the trip-literature rather more closely) in cash -- €60 each!

All in all, a most enjoyable 3 days. If you get the chance, my recommendation would be to jump at it. I don't think it's significantly changed my opinion of the EU (or of the Lib-Dems), but perhaps it has shifted it a little on the spectrum between "They've all got their snouts in the trough" and "They're all naive fools". And, because I had such a good time, I feel a bit ungrateful in not thinking better of the EU. Maybe that's what the €60 subsidy is for.

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If anyone's interested, the speaker I refered to above, in a debate about conservation in the Baltic, was Jeffery Titford, a UKIP MEP. Both the MEPs who addressed us, and the lady from IFAW, the NGO, were very dismissive of the UKIP contingent, usually citing RKS as example (and even I can see that RKS is a waste of space and taxpayers' money), but I was impressed by what Titford said, which I reproduce below:

Madam President, the common fisheries policy is without doubt one of the most disastrous of all EU common policies. It has inflicted incredible damage on the ecology of the North Sea and has done absolutely nothing for conservation. Not satisfied with this disaster, the EU is actually encouraging its repetition in African coastal waters. You can therefore imagine the cynicism with which I read this proposal for special technical measures to improve the conservation situation in the Baltic Sea.

The rapporteur has produced an extraordinarily unhelpful explanatory statement, which is really little more than a blow-by-painful-blow account of a paper trail. At the end there is a complicated appendix which seeks to lay down the law on the specifications for codends and even the exact size and shape of codend buoys. Why this House should be preoccupying itself with such minutiae is beyond me, unless it is yet another symptom of the European Union’s limitless propensity for control-freakism. Doubtless these technical specifications will have been dreamt up by bureaucrats without the slightest experience of sea fishing and will therefore cause enormous problems for the people who have to have such experience and work on a daily basis.

I do not believe that the EU has any business in involving itself in conservation in the Baltic, or anywhere else for that matter. These issues should be resolved by sensible negotiation between national government and fishermen, not by an unelected bureaucracy with an absolutely appalling track record for environmental vandalism.

I lifted it from the EU website; is it always that slow?

Bellatrix

Isn't it so ridiculous that people tar UKIP with the RKS brush. He's not a UKIP MEP anymore: they want to hate us for trying to burst their cushy little bubble, but they don't have any amunition.

As for the speech - we give informed speeches all the time, not just pointless rants.

SGK

But they know it hurts so they will carry on. The UKIP must learn from that and be more cautious who their bedfellows are in the future, but also, they should hit back. They should equally take every opportunity to remind people that RKS is not UKIP.

re; the speeches made by UKIP MEPs in Brussels and elsewhere, every single one should be available for download from the website. When the next election comes, the people who voted for them should know they got good value for their cross. If you can't keep the voters you have....

Bellatrix

They are available.

Bluemerle

How about we all apply and have a trip to Brussels to see for ourselves what they are up to

SGK

That was quick! Yes I know they're available, otherwise the writer of the article couldn't have found it. That's not quite what I said though, is it?

Alex McKee

Yes we can't exactly expect potential voters to dig this sort of thing out. When I was interested in UKIP I went to Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukip - the article is a fair bit different now mainly thanks to Tom Wilde of this forum I beleive who made some adjustments before he joined us (I think)

Even so, it's still doesn't make good reading and some of it is too critical (I say as a critic myself). All material should be on UKIP.org and extremely easily accessible (ie: big link in menu perhaps?)


Alex

SGK

The official web site should be a treasure trove of information that people return to time and time again. If an MEP has the time to write a speach, go to Brusselsstrassbourgluxembourg and give it, then he has time to copy it onto the website or delegate that task to a minion.
Downloading a pdf of a speach over FDP onto a web server takes seconds, adding a link to a HTML page takes seconds. If the system is set up right, not too fancy, then no probs. Why is this basic advantage being thrown away?

(It's not just UKIP, most anti EU sites are static and rarely updated. Apologies to the many great bloggers who troll, er, I mean post to this board.)

Bellatrix

The new website is a ******* nightmare - everyone is complaining about how complicated it is.

What may be of help to those of you wishing to download speeches made by any MEP is:

http://www.europarl.ep.ec/sce/server...sce_cre_01.jsp

click on the name.

As for trips to the EP - speak to your MEP. There are frequently visitors groups coming out here and I think it's useful when campaigning for people to have first hand amunition of what this evil place is about.

Alex McKee

That's internal only by the looks of it Trixy.