“We’ve lost MEPs, but our influence has grown”: The Glenis Willmott interview

Glenis Willmott is the leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party. She is an MEP for the East Midlands, and is a former political officer for the GMB. She met Alex Smith on Monday, 16th November, 2009.

You spoke at conference about Labour not yet having won the argument on Europe. After the party’s poor showing at the European elections in June, do you still think Europe is comfortable ground for the party as a domestic issue?
I don’t think that we haven’t won the argument; I think we haven’t had the debate, that’s the problem. And yes, we can win the debate if we concentrate our efforts. But what’s happened for too long, from the top and subsequently all the way down, is that ministers have spoken of going to Europe for a battle. So it seems that anything that’s good is done by the UK government, and anything that isn’t so popular is “them over there, it’s nothing to do with us”. It’s that sort of atmosphere, I think, that’s making British people more and more Euro-sceptic. They’re not hearing about the facts, they don’t hear about the work we do, they don’t understand how important that work is and so they don’t see that Europe gives added value, that working together in the European Parliament enhances some of the things we’re trying to do nationally. My point at conference was that I don’t think we’re having that discussion with the British public; we’re not having that debate; and I think it’s time we did.

So how do we put Europe at the centre of our national debate and how do we articulate the achievements?
First of all, I think we have to be honest about how Europe helps. Look at the financial crisis, look at climate change; they are common issues, so it’s natural that you can do more working together across the borders of 27 countries. The same is true of the single market. So there have been huge benefits. But while we do talk about those benefits when we’re pressed to, it’s not the regular theme. Because there’s a general Euro-scepticism, people think they have to sound tough on Europe all the time instead of talking about how we should be co-operating, how we should be working together and what benefits that brings to us.

Do you find that’s very different amongst the other representatives in Strasbourg, that in other European countries they’re more positive about the ability of the European Parliament to make a difference?
Yes, and in fact that wouldn’t be a question that many countries would even ask. Some are Euro-sceptic, but in the main it’s considered normal and natural to say, “this is good and it’s come from European legislation and its enhanced what we’re doing nationally”. Then I think there are lots of things we’ve achieved in the past that we haven’t said enough about: achievements we’ve made on anti-discrimination, on workers’ rights, on a whole range of consumer issues – things that we deal with that people don’t know about because we don’t tell them. Simple things like mobile phone roaming legislation that reduces the amount people are paying for their phone charges – that was directly because of European legislation. But also things that are perhaps more difficult to grasp, like maternity and paternity pay, rights for part time workers, equality issues – all of those have come from European legislation.

A lot of people are concerned that too many laws are coming from Brussels, or that laws are being imposed on the British people against their will or from a legislature that doesn’t understand or have any interest in our way of life. How do you begin to allay those concerns?
People need to know that everything is done by a co-decision. We don’t make a decision in the European Parliament and then that’s something that’s forced onto the British people. We do make decisions in the European Parliament but then they also make decisions on that legislation in the European Council. It’s a complex method, but our country, along with every other member state, has representatives on the European Council – and those representatives also have to agree it. So nothing can be forced upon us. Also, you’ve got to understand that in terms of the European Parliament, we have the competencies that the member states agree we can have. So we don’t just sit there and suddenly say “we’re going to deal with X, Y and Z”. We deal with the competencies that have been handed to us by the various member states. So there is a lot of accountability and nothing can be done without the Council of Ministers’ agreement. It’s not as simple as the European Parliament deciding something and imposing its will; that’s not how it works.

Speaking of accountability, many people are equally concerned that while other countries have been given the opportunity to make a choice on the Lisbon Treaty through a referendum, that choice was denied to the British people. That’s something that angers a lot of people I speak to. Why do you think that option was never presented to the British people?
First of all, we live in a parliamentary democracy, that’s the first thing to say. In Ireland, they have no choice but to have a referendum; that’s part of their legislation and they have to do it. In this country it’s different because of our system of democracy. I’m not sure whether I would like the country to be run on referenda all the time in any case; where do you draw the line on holding referenda to decide things? Not only that, but we haven’t had referenda in the past when much bigger decisions were made about Europe: the single European Act, Maastricht – all of those things made much bigger changes than Lisbon does and we didn’t have a referendum What worries me is that I think people who say they want a referendum don’t really want one on the Lisbon Treaty; they want a referendum about whether we stay in the European Union at all.

Isn’t that still a valid question?
Of course, every question is a valid question. But what many people don’t do is explain the importance and the value of being part of the EU and the enormous consequences of coming out, for jobs, for a whole range of things. It would be horrendous to think of the consequences of coming out of Europe. Some of those people are also living in the past. Times have moved on, times have changed and when you’re dealing with issues like climate change, people do recognise that you can’t deal with them in isolation, that you have to work together.

Let’s move on to the Tories’ new policy on Europe. David Cameron reneged on what he called a cast-iron pledge to hold a referendum on Lisbon…
It’s gone a bit rusty…

Right. And replacing that Tory position is one that wishes to legislate here for a sovereignty law which would allow some powers – including social and employment jurisdiction – to return to Westminster. Is that something that to your mind is a workable policy?
I don’t see how it can work and I don’t think David Cameron has been questioned enough on this. Firstly, David Cameron made a “cast-iron pledge”, which he reneged on. We always said to him, “what are you going to do if this is ratified before a general election and before you would have the opportunity to hold a referendum if you won power.” He would always avoid that question and he would always say he’d wait and see if it was ratified. Now he’s probably very pleased that he doesn’t have to have a referendum, quite frankly, because he now gets to take his time over it. But he’s back-peddling all the time because he really does understand the value of our membership in the EU; he understands that, whatever the rhetoric. This new policy is all about dogma; it’s about giving a sop to people on the right, the anti-Europeans and the Euro-sceptics. But I don’t think it’s workable. What are they’re really talking about when they talk about social and employment legislation? Are they talking about withdrawing maternity and paternity benefits? Are they talking about withdrawing paid holidays as of right? Are they talking about rights for part time workers? Is it wrong that part time workers should be treated equally? These are all things that have come from Europe, so what exactly are they talking about? We’ve fought for a long time for some of these things, in both the Labour and the Trade Union movements, and now we’ve got them the Tories don’t seem to like it and want to take those rights away from working people.

So how much of exposing the new Tory policy has to occur here in our domestic politics and how much should occur on the benches in the European Parliament?
I think it has to occur in both places, but it’s particularly important here in the UK. At the end of the day, this is where the general election will be, this is where people will make their minds up and this is where the dividing lines are between the Tories and Labour. On Europe, they’re split because not only are Cameron’s policies on Europe unworkable, but also a lot of his MEPs don’t agree with his policies on Europe. A lot of them are unhappy about what’s happening. So they’re split in Europe, they’re split in the UK and once again Europe has become their Achilles’ Heel. They know the benefits of the EU but they play to the Euro-sceptic press, particularly The Sun. What they’re doing, though, is putting us in a position where we could lose influence as a nation. If they were to take control in a general election – which God forbid they do – we’d have the Tories who turn their back on their natural allies, Sarkozy and Merkel, and who have forged alliances with some really strange people. They’ve lost influence already, and they’ve lost credibility in the European Parliament: people now just shrug and say, “well, it’s the Tories”. They don’t have the credibility that they once had and that’s a concern.

Do you see that feeling amongst your European counterparts, too?
Yes, absolutely. They can’t understand why the Tories are doing it. The thing people here sometimes forget is that the group they’ve left, the European People’s Party, is the largest group in the European Parliament, and because it’s the largest group it has the most influence. But now the Tories have sidelined themselves from that group. What benefit is that to people in Britain? How can they influence decisions in that position? It’s a real concern that we could have less and less influence in the European Parliament – amongst British MEPs and those from other European countries.

What is Labour doing in the European Parliament to try and counter that, to try and strengthen your own voices and your own role in response to the Tories’ new position?
We’ve got very strong links within our own Socialist and Democrat group, for a start. On the climate change and the environmental agenda, Labour has the person who coordinates the whole of the Socialist group. On the financial crisis, Labour has two MEPs, plus a substitute MEP on the economic committee. When there were 19 of us before June, we had seven European Parliament positions. Now with only thirteen MEPs we have ten positions in the Parliament. And a lot of those are leading on behalf of the whole socialist group: on the environment, on human rights, on civil liberties. So we’ve really have maximised our influence and strengthened our position. Of course, we’d have liked to have 30 or 40 MEPs, but that wasn’t to be. So we’ve done amazingly well with the numbers we’ve got.

You talk about there being “strange” people in the Tories’ new group. In your Labour conference speech, you said these ranged from “Polish homophobes to anti-Semites to climate change deniers”. Who were you referring to?
Well, you’ve got some of the members of the Polish party that they’re involved with who are quite outspokenly homophobic. We’ve had all the controversial discussions about the Latvians and the Waffen SS – there’s been a lot in the papers about that and David Miliband mentioned it in his conference speech as well. There’s been a lot of discussion about it in the papers and if you have a look back at the records of some of these people you’ll see that they are not a savoury bunch of people, not at all. There are climate change deniers in the Czech party they’re involved with, but they’ve also got climate change deniers amongst their own MEPs. Roger Helmer, for example, admits climate change is happening, but he doesn’t think it’s man-made. So you’ve got David Cameron on the one hand talking about green policies, trying to be environmentally friendly, saying we’ve got to combat climate change; but then you’ve got people in his own group in the European Parliament saying they don’t agree with that at all.

But just this weekend in the Times a poll showed that a majority of people in this country are sceptical as to whether climate change is man-made. So that’s another argument that still has to be won, with more science and more thinking clearly needed. If climate change is one of the issues that the European Parliament has jurisdiction for, how do you win that argument in times of economic difficulty when environmental issues are not a priority for many?
A few years ago, climate change was quite high on the agenda for most people. But, yes, in any economic crisis, people will focus on that, of course they will. But even now if you talk to young people – and they’re the future after all – you see that they want us to do something about climate change. If we don’t, then they’ll say in twenty years time “you could’ve done something about this and you chose not to.” And the majority of scientists agree that we have to tackle these issues, that climate change is man-made. So we have no option. Look at the issues with flooding we’ve had in the UK, look at a whole range of changes in climate across the continents. Anyone who says that this isn’t happening ought to just look at the news occasionally, and look at the floods and the droughts and see how they have affected people in Africa in particular. And can I just say that if anybody wants to see what a Tory government looks like, just go and have a look at the record of Tory MEPS in the European Parliament: they weren’t pro-climate change action, and they’re not pro-women. There’s a whole range of issues on which David Cameron says one thing, but his Tory MEPs act and vote in a different way.

And that could be a problem if the Tories come into government next year; that David Cameron will have to give concessions to his right arm. Even some of their up-and-coming PPCs are very right wing. So if we’re trying to win the argument against these doubters on Europe and climate change, what will you do in your day-today agenda in the European Parliament?
So many things. What happens is we all specialise in different areas. My committee is the environment committee. We have other colleagues who specialise on financial issues. So we try to bring added value to those debates; we try to make sure that we’re winning the debate in the European Parliament in a way that helps Britain. At the end of the day, we’re British MEPS and defending British interests is our priority. So when we deal with legislation, we put amendments down and shape laws to ensure it’s the sort of legislation that we agree with and that we would like to see.

How are you reacting to the arrival of the two new members from the British National Party? What’s your strategy for dealing with them and what’s the general feeling there toward the BNP and the other far-right members who were already there?
Well, it was horrendous to wake up and have two BNP MEPs. It was awful, and what was particularly awful was that they weren’t elected because they increased their share of the vote; they were elected because so many Labour voters stayed at home. Many Labour members switched to UKIP as well, as a protest. So the election in June wasn’t really about European issues. Westminster expenses dominated on the doorstep and it was impossible to get through that barrier. But you’re right, we have got fascists already sitting in the European Parliament, and we’re used to having that group there, though that doesn’t make it any more palatable. We’ve now got Nick Griffin on the environment committee, and we’ve got Andrew Brons on the civil liberties committee. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have people like that sitting on those committees; I’m on them both, so I have a double dose of them and it’s awful. But we have to keep watching the BNP, we have to monitor them and we have to make sure we challenge them at every opportunity.

And we then need to make sure that those messages – what you learn about the BNP in the European Parliament – transfer to the people in the UK…
Absolutely. We keep in close contact with the group set up to deal with the BNP. It’s difficult, but we have to look at why people moved to the BNP, or why people didn’t come out to vote Labour, which is the truth of the matter. Some of those issues are around fear and a range of things to do with the economic crisis – people fearful for their jobs, fearful for their homes – and we have to make sure that we’re supporting people through that crisis. Quite often the BNP will talk in the community about housing, but is that really their agenda? So we have to work in those communities, too. What we find is, if we do campaign in those communities and make sure our message is getting across, we can beat them.

The sad irony of the BNP’s two MEPs is that one of the issues that they’ve been elected as a result of is the perceived mass immigration from Europe and elsewhere. And now they’re being represented in that very arena. How do reconcile that?
We have to explain our case and deal with some of the issues of concern. But when people talk about mass migration from other countries, they often forget about the hundreds of thousands of British people that work in other European countries. Look at the number of British people who live in Spain, for example. If you talk to some of my Spanish colleagues, they’ll tell you about the fact that the Brits won’t learn Spanish, that they live in little communities, that they won’t integrate and it’s changing the face of parts of Spain. That sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? But people always seem to see immigration purely as an issue of others coming into the UK; they don’t see it in terms of the number of British people who live and work abroad, which far outweighs the number of people coming from other European countries into Britain.

Plus there’s the case for people coming to work in the UK and contributing to the working of our economy and contributing to our public services though tax…
Absolutely, and doing some of the jobs that we don’t want to do. This is a two-way flow of people coming into and going out of Britain; it’s about adding to our economy. So there’s a whole range of benefits of migration.

Going forward over the next six months in the run up to the election and over the ensuing years of your new Parliament, what’s on the agenda for Labour in Europe, and what will you be doing to explain that work back here in the UK?
Well, one of the biggest things we’ve got to deal with is the financial crisis, but there’s also climate change and the Copenhagen talks in December. We’ve got a new committee set up to deal with the financial crisis, we’ve got a European Economic Recovery plan, there’s a whole range of measures we’re trying to put together to ensure that the crisis doesn’t happen again. We’ve got to make sure that there’s regulation in place that’s European-wide. And people do ask, “why can’t we just do it in Britain?” Well, we could have regulation in Britain, but if we do that, some of our financial institutions would just get up and move to France or Germany or wherever it is they want to go.

Will some get up and go to Shanghai, or Singapore or Mumbai or New York, emerging markets outside the EU?
I doubt it very much, because they want to be based in Europe. But we need Europe-wide regulation to ensure that we haven’t got companies jumping ship and moving to another European country, and we have to have that regulation across the board. But we also need to make sure that at the same time we don’t stifle entrepreneurship and we don’t stifle British business. I think everybody would agree we’ve gone through a very traumatic time and we’re still not through it yet. Incidentally, in Europe, Gordon Brown is a hailed as a hero because he was the only person who knew how to deal with this crisis. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Britain, but it certainly is the case in other European countries. So we’ll be working very hard to make sure we’ve got regulation in place, that benefits the whole of Europe but that doesn’t cause us any difficulties in terms of our own financial industries.

Finally, yesterday on the doorstep someone asked me whether the signing of the Lisbon Treaty meant that we’d all end up speaking the same language…
That’s a total misconception and a nonsense, of course. Our nationalities and cultures are not going to change; Lisbon doesn’t make you change who you are or your culture. I think is comes from the concern about the language of the “Presidency”. The reason we needed Lisbon is that at the moment there’s a different President from a different member state, each with a unique agenda, every six months. It takes them three months to get to know what’s happening and then three months later you’ve got someone else standing there, with another new agenda and new priorities. That stifles progress; you can’t get on with things because every six months there’s somebody different coordinating everything. So it’s sensible to have someone in place for two and a half years so we can set out a longer-term agenda, sort our priorities out and get on with doing the job.

Will it be a strategic position or a nuts and bolts position? Is Tony Blair good for the job?
There are two schools of thought at the moment and we haven’t yet decided what the role of the President is going to be. Some people want the President just to chair the council meetings; other people are saying this could be a much bigger role. If we do want to act with one voice, then we should have someone who can articulate the common views of the 27 different member countries. If Tony Blair gets that job he would be absolutely excellent. He’s got fantastic credentials. He’d have access to heads of state across to world, and to me that’s a big plus. Whether he’s going to get it or not, we shall wait and see.

This is the first in a new series of interviews running until Christmas.