Earlier this week I went to France for meetings with Pierre Lellouche (French Minister with responsibility for European affairs). We discussed a wide range of issues of common importance, such as defence cooperation, but also Europe’s relationships with China, India and Turkey. In between our meetings I recorded a video blog. Watch it and find out more about my time in France. For accessibility, I’ve also included a text transcript of the video blog below.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello. Well I’m in Paris at the moment. I came over on Eurostar after a meeting in London this morning and I’m here to talk in particular to my French counterpart Pierre Lellouche who’s the Minister for Europe in the French Government.
We’ve had one session and I’m recording this before I go off and rejoin him for dinner. Pierre has had to go and do a constituency engagement so you can see that the pressures of juggling constituency and ministerial life are not unique to the United Kingdom. We’ve talked about a number of things so far. There are some important discussions going on about defence cooperation between British and French Ministers. Liam Fox our defence secretary was over here in Paris a couple of days ago to talk to his opposite number. We’re the two biggest military powers in Western Europe and particularly with financial pressures, but more importantly because we share many ideas in common about the way forward for NATO and the Western alliance, it’s important that we do work together as closely as possible.
I’ve also been talking to Monsieur Lellouche about things like Europe’s relationship with China and India, with Turkey, about the development of the External Action Service, which is the new European organisation to bring together the different parts of Europe’s overseas missions, which have up until now been divided between the Commission and the Council of Ministers. And again, Britain and France…I mean we don’t see eye to eye on everything but we do have a lot in common. We’re both out to defend our national interests vigorously, but we also both agree that foreign policy in Europe should remain intergovernmental. That Europe, where we can get agreement between different member states, can speak with a more powerful and influential voice and that helps all of us, but this should remain something for foreign ministers and heads of government to thrash out between themselves and not something we want to hand over the European Commission and European Parliament. We also touched today on some of the financial issues that confront us. France like Britain is a net contributor to the European budget. They and we pay more in than we get out, and so we’ve been talking about the need for economy, about better value for money, about controlling European expenditure because both the British and French governments are having to impose some painful cuts on public expenditure at home and we need to justify what we’re doing to our own people.