Downing Street Says » Transcript of press briefing given by Tom Kelly in Strasbourg

Here at the European Parliament the Prime Minister will be meeting the Party of European Socialists group, the European Socialists, then President Borrell, then the Conference of Presidents, then the UK Conservative Delegation, then the European People’s Party, the Conservative grouping, and the European Parliamentary Labour Party. He will then address the European Parliament during a plenary debate at PPL. He will then do a press conference at 4.30 with President Borrell, then back to London where he will host a dinner for the PES leaders, that is the 7 Prime Ministers of Hungary, Czech, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden and Lithuania.

We have commissioned various policy papers which we are going to publish this afternoon via the policy network presidency website. These are discussion papers which we have commissioned to help stimulate the debate. They are papers which are independent. We believe they are important in stimulating the debate, but what people need to understand is that they are not our papers, therefore we do not agree with every dot and comma in them. We think they are important. The areas they will cover are migration, the globalisation adjustment fund, the dimension of Europe, European energy policy and also the Nordic experience. I stress again they are for stimulating debate, not because we agree with every single word.

We were being told that the timetable hadn’t been blown off course, but it has.

We are confident that by the end of the day we will have a clear idea of where we are going and that the Cabinet committee system will deliver that clear idea, but I think it is better that that emerges during the day, rather than me talking about it now.

I think the important thing is that by the end of the day we will have a clear idea of (a) the content, and (b) the timetable … but I think it is better that that emerges during the day.

Tom, could you just give us an idea of what the Prime Minister is going to say today, is he going to talk about the Presidency, is he going to talk about the summit tomorrow, what is the idea behind …

Today is very much about a report back. June set out the vision of why and how the Prime Minister believes Europe must respond to the challenge and the opportunity of globalisation. Today is about filling out that vision and setting out what he believes are the priority areas for Europe to address to meet the challenge of globalisation, and you get a rough idea of where his thinking is in terms of the discussion papers with the Commission – it is R and D, it is the future of universities, it is energy, it is addressing the issues of migration for instance. So all of those are key areas. Now what he is also doing today is mapping out how he sees the progress that we need to make in the next two months in the run-up to the December summit. The informal summit is not going to be the occasion to talk about future financing, but December will be. Therefore, what he will be mapping out today is his view of having spent the period from June to now in intensive dialogue with the Commission on how we see the way forward, the Commission having produced the globalisation paper, and now how do we get from this stage to the December summit.

Will the Prime Minister say today what he has actually achieved since June, and can you tell us what that is?

If you reflect back on what has happened since June, we have had the successful conclusion to Turkey starting accession talks; that process has now begun, so we have achieved that. We have also moved in turning into analysis the vision the Prime Minister set out in June, and if you read the globalisation paper by the Commission, it shows very clearly that we are in the process of translating the vision of June into concrete reality. Now that will then in turn set the parameters for the debate on future financing. The important thing is to get the horse and the cart in the right order. You don’t start with the detail, you start with the strategic vision, and that is what he will be setting out today.

There is a piece by Jacques Chirac in the FT (Financial Times) today that seems to be quite supportive. Can you just tell me how that relationship is working?

The meeting with President Chirac recently in Paris was important in that we did identify common themes in terms of how we respond to globalisation, and today’s article in the FT goes further down that road. Now what nobody is pretending, is that there won’t be difficult decisions to be taken if we are to achieve the success we want to achieve in December. The progress we have made is that there is now a consensus on the need to face up to the challenges and the opportunities of globalisation, and there is now a consensus about what it is that Europe needs to do in terms of upskilling its workforce, in terms of upgrading its universities, in terms of … the energy question, and there is consensus about the areas we need to make progress on. There also seems to be a growing consensus around the idea of a globalisation fund to help, not companies, but individuals to reskill themselves to meet the challenges of globalisation. So I think there is a common agenda emerging, but what that doesn’t take is the fact that there is going to be hard work to be done between now and December to put that vision into reality.

It may be that you have got a consensus about the fact that there is a problem on all of these fronts, on globalisation, and energy and migration, but there is no signal really from anything that has been said or done so far that we are making any progress in resolving them.

Of course we are in the process of trying to negotiate a way to agree on these issues. You are quite right, merely identifying issues doesn’t guarantee that you are going to be successful in finding solutions to them, but it is a start if you can agree the agenda. And what is important is that there is an emerging consensus for what the agenda is, and we now have two months in which to try to turn that consensus into agreement on how we meet those priorities, and how for instance in terms of the EU budget, that should reflect those priorities, not the priorities of the past, but the priorities of the future.

The question here was that the Prime Minister said last time he was here that a social system with 20 million unemployed wasn’t working, do we think France and Germany should reform their system. It is not our job to tell other countries what they do with their internal systems. What is important to recognise is that if you do have nearly 20 million unemployed, there are several questions which have to be asked about how we move forward to try to resolve that situation, and part of that is we believe that markets need to open up and we need to resolve the outstanding dossiers on the services directive and so on. So of course there is work to do, and of course today is not the day when we say we are going to get agreement. The important thing however is the strategic direction that will come out of not just today, but particularly tomorrow at the informal summit, is it heading in the right direction.

Does the Prime Minister think it would be appropriate for his wife to return part of her fee in Australia … to the Australian children’s charity.

I don’t comment on Mrs Blair, and in terms of the charity, there has been a statement from the agent which handled the tour, which deals with the matters.

I have been asked whether the Austrians and the Finnish are supporting us. That will be a matter for them to express their own view. The important thing is that people are taking this seriously. They know that the Prime Minister has set out a very clear analysis of the problems in June, and therefore they know that we have to try and find the answers to those problems. That is why it is an informal summit, not to come tomorrow with a set of pre-cooked responses, but to come and have a genuine debate about how, with each country’s individual traditions, we meet the challenge of globalisation, how we try and address the problem of 19 million unemployed in Europe. The important thing is that we emerge with a strategic sense of direction out of tomorrow, and then we do the hard work to implement that in detail.

Back to smoking again, is the Prime Minister going to be able to have discussions with colleagues before decisions are made?

This is a matter that is being handled through the Cabinet committee structure, and that is the best place to leave it.

You can’t go from analysing the problem one day to immediate responses. Frankly that would be glib and superficial. What is important is that people understand the full complexity of the situation that we face in relation to globalisation. That is why we worked so intensively, there were half a dozen meetings with President Barroso, with the Commission before it produced the Commission paper on globalisation. It is very much their paper reflecting their discussions with other countries in Europe, but it was a very intensive process. Equally that is why we commissioned these academic papers, to stimulate discussion. But of course there comes a point in the next two months, and that point is where you have to turn the general discussion into reality.

But equally what you can’t run away from is the need to address these questions, the questions of how do you upgrade Europe’s universities, how do you deal with the issue of migration, how do you increase spending on research and development, how do you deal with workers who find that they lose their jobs because of the pressures of globalisation. And these are real questions which demand more than superficial answers, they demand not just glib actions, but actually actions which will reverberate and benefit Europe, not just next month, or in the next six months, or next year, but for the next 10 years and that is what we are after, it is a fundamental process and it needs to be treated in a serious way.

I have been asked about Jacques Chirac saying that he wants us to double R and D spending through the European Investment Bank. In terms of more spending on R and D, yes in broad principle we are agreed to that, the mechanism of how you do that is a matter for discussion as part of the discussions over the next two months. Today and tomorrow are not the days for deciding the detail, today and tomorrow is deciding the priorities for Europe and setting the agenda for the detailed discussions which are to come in the next two months. The UK Presidency does not last four months, it lasts six months, and therefore what you should do is use that six months to the full to achieve your objectives, that is what we are doing.

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