Press briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: Smoking, George Galloway, Bird Flu, EU Parliament and the Informal meeting at Hampton Court, Future Financing, Global Trade and EU Constitution and the Abatement
Smoking
Asked if the bill on smoking would definitely be published tomorrow, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said he had no information to suggest otherwise. Asked why the Government couldn’t just stick to the policy they had announced during the election, the PMOS said that there had been a consultation exercise which we had a to take into account of when we made an announcement. Asked if the bill might be published without detailed issues being resolved within the Cabinet, the PMOS said that he didn’t want to get into talking about announcements before they have been made, but we should be clear that smoking was a genuinely difficult issue which people came at from different perspectives. There were practical issues which had to be resolved. Would ongoing work be necessary to finally resolve and pin down practical issues? He suspected the answer to that was yes. But would there be a clear direction in which we were going? The answer to that was also yes.
George Galloway
Asked if the row between George Galloway and the Senate committee might damage the special relationship, the PMOS said that there were some issues which one learned to stay out of. This was top of that list.
Bird Flu
Asked if the Prime Minister was confident that DEFRA could handle the issue of Avian flu, the PMOS said that the important thing to recognise was that the quarantine procedures had actually worked. They did identify the bird and allow the appropriate action to be taken. Of course, as with anything, you looked back at the procedures and adapted accordingly, but the bottom line was that the current procedures had done their job.
Europe - Joint Briefing between London and Brussels
European Parliament and the Informal meeting at Hampton Court
The PMOS set out how the Prime Minister viewed his visit to the European Parliament tomorrow. It was important to set this in the context of our presidency as a whole. In June the Prime Minister had set out his positive vision of why and how he believed Europe had to be meet the challenge of globalisation. Modernizing the European social model. Tomorrow was in many ways a report back on what he had been doing since June, mapping out how we saw the next two months, which would be a hard two months and why we needed to move to the next stage in that two months.
To be clear, since June we had been involved in probably one of the most intensive dialogues between a presidency and the European Commission, as well as our European partners. The aim was to make the vision set out in June a reality. The Prime Minister for instance has met President Barroso half a dozen times since June. We have discussed it with out partners and the Commission has had meetings and discussions as well with a wide range of people. As a result, the Commission, last week, set out their thinking about how we met the challenge of globalisation in a paper, and he would urge anyone who was covering European issues to read that paper. The Prime Minister believed that the globalisation paper would set the agenda for the informal summit because it identified the areas we needed to prioritise if we were to respond to the charge of globalisation. These areas included R&D: Higher Education, particularly universities; Energy; Demographics.
What we hoped to achieve at Hampton Court was an overall strategic consensus on the direction for Europe and use that consensus to shape the hard work over the next few months. That work would be filling in the specifics of the overall strategy and working up to the December summit where we hoped to reach a deal on future financing and clear the outstanding dossiers as well. This was obviously a very ambitions agenda and we made no bones about that. It would require a lot of clear thinking and a lot of determination from the EU as a whole. To help that vision come to fruition, the Prime Minister had commissioned a series of academic papers dealing with issues such as education, R&D, energy and migration which we would publish tomorrow. These were papers from academics which he hoped would help stimulate debate. They were not necessarily papers with which we agreed with every dot and comma in them or every proposal in them, but we believed it was important that there should be a debate, that the work over the next couple of months should be shaped by real, clear thinking about how we met the challenge of globalisation. The aim was to turn the vision of June into a reality which would then result in practical steps within the EU.
Asked what sort of work the Prime Minister would be doing over the next two months, the PMOS said he would be doing whatever was necessary to reach an agreement and achieve our objectives. Those objectives were to turn the vision in to reality, to try and reach a future financing deal and to try clear the outstanding dossiers. The Prime Minister had said that he would try to talk to each of the heads of government. That might be through meetings at events such as the EU med Summit after Chogm or it might be by phone call. Whatever way was necessary to build consensus we would do. Clearly officials would be heavily involved. Clearly also the Foreign Secretary would be involved as would the FCO.
Future Financing
Asked why there wouldn’t be detailed discussions of the European budget at the informal meeting, the PMOS said that we had been very clear, as had the Commission, that we did not see the informal meeting as being about future financing. In terms of the position of new member states, we were fully aware and had been, as acknowledged in June, of their desire to try and get a settlement in December. What we had to do here was get the horse and cart in the right order. We had to agree the strategic vision and direction for Europe before we resolved how that was reflected in the budget. That was the proper way forward. That did not mean that we would try to sideline the issue of future financing in any way. It did however mean that we decided the parameters in which we approached that negotiation. Future financing would undoubtedly form a large part of the very hard work over the next two months.
Asked if he was saying that if the EU endorsed the government’s strategic vision, the Prime Minister was signalling to them there might be flexibility on the budget, the PMOS said that that adopted an unnecessarily macho approach to the subject. This was about identifying what Europe had to do to respond to the real challenge and opportunity of globalisation. That was not a political game, that was a reality. In June the Prime Minister had started to sketch out how he believed Europe had to respond. Since then we had worked with the Commission, and the Commission had produced their paper on how they thought Europe needed to respond. That paper would act as the agenda for Hampton Court. That then gave you a strategic framework in which you could address the question of the budget. It was about getting the horse and the cart in the right order.
Put to him that if we were really keen on moving things forward we should get something more detailed and concrete from the informal meeting at Hampton Court, the PMOS said that there was no point going into detail before the context was decided for that detail. There was no point trying to decide the detial of the future financing budget until we knew what strategic direction you were trying to shape. For instance with an issue like universities we knew that Europe’s universities had to be able to compete, not just with the United States but also with China and India. What was the best way to try and make that happen? Equally in terms of something like what happened when companies went bust? Did you spend money and try and save the company or spend money trying to help individual workers get new jobs. President Barroso had come up with the idea of a globalisation fund, we believed that that had merit and was worth examining. In this country for instance when Rover went bust, we spent money on helping to retrain workers. That was the sort of approach we needed to respond to the pressures of globalisation. To suggest that the issue we were discussing at Hampton Court were not real issues was wrong. What you had to do was agree the strategy before you got to the detail.
Asked if the Presidency had any specific proposals for dealing with globalisation, the PMOS said that the time for specifics was December. The globalisation fund was one idea that President Barroso had come up with. What we were talking about was modernising the European social model. Of course how that was interpreted would vary from country to country. The key thing was what was the underlying strategy in terms of what we were trying to do. Was it right to try and protect countries from globalisation? We believed that that was a false approach. What we had to do was make ourselves fit to meet the challenge and seize the opportunities and that was what we believed we would do.
Asked how he assessed the atmospherics of the summit, the PMOS said that he thought there was a real recognition in Europe that the issues of globalisation were ones we had to address. We saw that when the Prime Minister addressed the European Parliament in June. We had seen that in our meetings with other leaders. They would speak for themselves and he did not want to put words in their mouths, but in terms of the actual content of meetings that had shown a positive spirit. We had seen that in the Commissions paper, which was very much their paper, which we regarded as a very serious analysis and a very serious piece of work. People recognised that this was not about arguing over specifics alone. This was about trying to set a strategic vision for Europe and a vision which translated into detail. Therefore in short the atmospherics were serious. The issues were difficult, we should not pretend otherwise. The answers were not obvious but there was a will to try and agree an overall consensus on how we moved forward.
Asked how the Prime Minister could make his vision binding, the PMOS said that of course the proof of the pudding was in the eating and the Prime Minister himself acknowledged that in June. He didn’t think that anybody could accuse the Prime Minister of having pulled his punches in his speech in June. Equally the European Union worked by consensus. You could not impose on the European Union measures which it did not as a whole wish to accept. The spirit with which people approached this summit was important. The very nature of the summit was an informal discussion. It was not one in which the whole agenda has been pre-cooked between officials. This was primarily so that we could debate the issues in a serious way, but also get a sense of how we could move forward. December would decide whether people were determined enough and serious enough to reach consensus. If we could get a future financing deal, that would show that we were serious.
Put to him that Luxembourg had already made a highly detailed study of European finance and asked what the substance of the discussions would be on future finance, the PMOS said that he wondered how long it would be before we got to the point where somebody actually wanted him to essentially start the negotiations on the future financing deal. He was sorry but he was not going to go down that road. We should do things in the proper order and that the proper order was that we should agree that strategy and the priorities before we moved to the question of how the budget fitted those priorities. Of course it was a detailed process and of course it was difficult, but we had been round the course with the Luxembourg presidency, we knew the issues. Therefore if the will and the determination was there, the Prime Minister believed that we could get the deal. Nobody was under-estimating the ambition of the task we had set ourselves. But in turn no one should underestimate our determination to give it a real go.
Asked about the Prime Minister’s speech tomorrow, the PMOS said that although he wouldn’t give specifics about what the Prime Minister was going to say, not least because it would probably change between now and then, the spirit of his approach was that June was about setting out his overview of how changed Europe and it was seen by most people in that light. Tomorrow was not the time for that over-view. Tomorrow was much more about reporting back what the Presidency had been doing since June and mapping out how he saw us going forward between now and December. Tomorrow was work in progress, giving people a sense of what we were trying to do in the six-month presidency. Tomorrow was not the end of our presidency, it was if you like, the half-way point.
Put to him that France and some of the East European states would say that we could have done a deal on the budget off the back of the Luxembourg presidency in June and we had wrecked it and to add insult to injury we were now attempting to link the question of European farm subsidies with the wider question of the WTO Doha round, and there by offending a lot of our partner states, thus wrecking the presidency and the WTO round as well, the PMOS asked if there was anything else we could be charged with? Firstly he didn’t see the need to go over the arguments of why the June summit hadn’t succeeded. We had set out our arguments at the time. What was important was to persuade people about why we did need to get the horse and cart in the right order. We needed to persuade people that Europe did need to get its response to globalisation right, before it was reflected in the budget, not the other way round. East European countries knew that globalisation was as much an issue for them as it was for us in the UK. They knew that they, like us had to raise their skills and their R&D spending and raise their university education, so that we could meet the global challenge. It was not something that was a UK agenda imposed on the rest of Europe. There was a reality which we all had to deal with. Therefore we all had to find a strategic response to it. That was not something that people dismissed lightly. People recognised that was the reality we were dealing with. Therefore what we were not talking about was putting future financing off to some Never Never Land. We were talking about two hard months of work to get a deal, but knowing the strategic context within which we got that deal.
Asked, given the negative spirit with which France was approaching the summit, what magic ingredient were he hoping to bring that would unblock resistance in Europe, the PMOS said that he couldn’t speak for other member states, but he could reflect the spirit in which we met our partners in Europe, including France. That spirit was one of real engagement with the issues of globalisation and a real recognition of the need for consensus on issues such as R&D, universities, energy migration, transport and so on. Those were real issue which had to be addressed in a real way. That was the basis on which we approached this summit and we hoped that was the spirit in which others approached it.
Put to him that we had heard a lot of rhetoric from the Prime Minister but had very few specifics, the PMOS said that people should read the Commission’s paper on globalisation. In June we had set out a vision. We had worked intensely with the Commission, more intensively perhaps then any preceding presidency and the Commission have produced their paper, which reflected the views of Europe as a whole, on how we moved forward. That paper was anything but rhetoric. It was a very detailed analysis of Europe needed to move forward. Tomorrow the Prime Minister would report back in detail on how we envisaged the next few months, precisely to turn the vision into specifics. You couldn’t leap before you could jump. This had to be taken step by step and while it might be nice for the media to go from grand to vision to detailed reality in a few days, reality is more complex than that.
Asked where Agriculture appeared on our list of priorities and surely that should be a priority where a deal needed to be made, the PMOS said that this was an issue for future financing which should be influenced by what Europe believed its priorities were. What did Europe believe its priorities should be over the next ten or twenty years in terms of how it responded to globalisation. If you didn’t know the strategic direction you couldn’t answer the detail. The important thing was that we got that consensus on the strategic direction and then approach the detail not the other way round. Questioned further, the PMOS said that in terms of the overall debate of course people would reach a consensus about where agriculture stood in terms of priorities. The key point was what actually were our priorities.
Global Trade
Asked if the Prime Minister tomorrow would be setting out a strategic vision for global trade talks and try to break the deadlock in the Doha round on agriculture, the PMOS said that he thought that would be taking ambition a bit too far. The Prime Minister had stressed the importance of the Doha round time and again and the need to make progress. The details of negotiation were a matter for the Commission and that work was being carried on by the trade commissioner Peter Mandelson. In terms of the detailed negotiation, that was for the European Commission. Obviously though the Prime Minister was keeping a very close eye on developments within the WTO round and the need to keep moving forward. We were entering in to a very significant period of the WTO round and we would do everything we could to make sure that worked, because it was essential it did work as the Prime Minister had said on many occasions.
EU Constitution and the Abatement
Asked about what progress the Prime Minister hoped to make on the EU constitution and the UK’s abatement, the PMOS said that he doubted that the constitution would be discussed this week and our position on that is as it was. On the abatement, the Prime Minister had said in June, that the abatement was on the table but in the context of overall reform of the budget. That hadn’t changed. These were not issues for the informal summit.
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