News Releases
Showing: November 2011
Here you can find an archive of all the news items that have been on this website as well as any comments, polls or surveys.
Eurobond "safety net" will only encourage further risk
Posted,11/23/2011 3:00:00 PM
Eurobonds could ultimately make the economic crisis worse, not better, Conservative MEPs warned today. Kay Swinburne, Conservative spokesman on economic and monetary affairs in the European Parliament, said she feared the bonds would be a disincentive for governments facing economic turmoil to make tough but vital financial decisions. "The danger is that struggling nations which are currently walking an economic high wire will see the bonds as their safety net. They may just continue taking risks because they believe the more-stable economies will catch them when they fall." The European Commission today published a Green Paper setting out three options for introducing eurobonds - now repackaged as 'stability bonds'. But Dr Swinburne said the plans to mutualise debt within the eurozone would not create the cure-all suggested. She explained: "They will create resentment among taxpayers in the more successful economies - and they will encourage complacency in the countries already facing crisis. "That is not a recipe for stability - it spells more strife, more turmoil, more trouble ahead. "Creating more debt is not the way out of a debt crisis."
Wake-up call to strike-threat bureaucrats
Posted,11/22/2011 6:00:00 PM
EU civil servants today voted to authorise their union leaders to call strike action in rejection of a 1.8 per cent pay offer and attempts to get them to work a 40 hour week.
Bikers' concerns over motorcycle type approval will be heard in European Parliament
Posted,11/22/2011 5:00:00 PM
As a number of bikers descend on Brussels to warn against draconian legislation affecting new motorbikes, the chairman of the parliament's lead committee on the matter has said that their concerns are being heard, and will be reflected in the final law.
MEP welcomes court ruling on holiday pay for long-term sick
Posted,11/22/2011 4:00:00 PM
The European Court of Justice today (Tues) ruled that workers on long-term sick leave have no automatic right to continue accruing holiday entitlement year after year. Instead, it said, individual countries should be allowed to set reasonable time limits on the entitlement of incapacitated employees to pay in lieu of leave once the individual returned to work or retired. The ruling on EU law was over a test case in which a German worker was claiming a settlement of thousands of euros because he had been unable to take annual leave when on sick leave for six years. Specifically, the court said: "In the case of a worker who is unfit for work for several consecutive reference periods, European Union law does not preclude national provisions or practices, such as collective agreements, which limit, by a carry-over period of 15 months on the expiry of which the right to paid annual leave lapses, the accumulation of entitlement to such leave." Welcoming the decision, Julie Girling, Conservative employment spokesman in the European Parliament, said: "It is good to see the ECJ accepting common sense on a matter which could have had a damaging effect on businesses large and small. "For a company to lose an employee on sick leave for for such a long time is challenge enough, but to then face an open-ended liability to pay that individual in lieu of annual leave would be adding insult to injury."
EU shark-fin ban welcomed
Posted,11/22/2011 11:00:00 AM
The EU has finally proposed an outright ban on shark finning, in a move welcomed by European Parliament fisheries committee Vice-President Struan Stevenson MEP, a longstanding campaigner against the practice.
Tory pressure thwarts big EU spending hike
Posted,11/21/2011 1:00:00 PM
A strong negotiating stance by Conservative MEPs, backed by Downing Street, has thwarted an attempt by the European Parliament to push through a major increase in the EU's budget next year.
MEP warns against taking antibiotics to fight coughs and colds
Posted,11/18/2011 5:00:00 PM
A study published by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) has revealed that up to half the cases of infections caused by a single superbug are now resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics.
Former minister Kirkhope backs Government's immigration strategy
Posted,11/17/2011 4:00:00 PM
Technology and improved intelligence techniques have changed the way our borders are policed, former Home Office Immigration Minister Timothy Kirkhope has said.
"Action not words" is Conservative message on euro
Posted,11/16/2011 5:00:00 PM
Leaders must stop talking and put plans to save the euro into action, Conservative MEP Kay Swinburne told the European Parliament today (Wednesday).
Alcan closure a disaster for region
Posted,11/16/2011 3:00:00 PM
Martin Callanan, leader of Britain's Conservative MEPs, today described the decision to close a Northumberland smelting plant as a disaster created by counter-productive environmental rules. The North East MEP said the announcement by metals giant Rio Tinto Zinc that it will close its Alcan aluminium complex at Lynemouth, with the loss of some 750 jobs, had been made inevitable by restrictive environmental regulations drawn up in Brussels and Britain. They had made the plant globally uncompetitive and effectively doomed it, he said. He said: "The grim irony is that the the rules that crippled Alcan's ability to compete will not save the planet an ounce of carbon emitted. British industry still needs the aluminium that was made here - only now it will be manufactured outside the EU and imported back here. "Hundreds of high-quality manufacturing jobs will effectively have been exported to the other side of the world from a region that can ill-afford to lose them." "The workers who will be made redundant have seen their livelihoods sacrificed to the obsession with all things green." The power station at the Lynemouth plant breaches limits imposed by the European Union and would have required huge investment to reduce emissions and the purchase of pollution credits to stay open after 2013.