Creating a Progressive Society: Europe

This is my fourth post about the Liberal Democrats one day policy conference Creating a Progressive Society held at the LSE on Saturday.

The second of the break out sessions I attended was the one organised by the Liberal Democrat European Parliamentary Party on “The European dimension”. Jonathan Fryer has already blogged about this and gives a good flavour of the session. I came away with two thoughts.

I was reminded just how much power and influence our Liberal Democrat MEPs have to influence the European legislation that impacts on us. This is especially true when they are the ‘rapporteurs’ on a particular proposal and then act “in a bloody minded Chris Davies way”.

But I also was reminded just how a big a gap there is between the European way of doing politics and the Westminster culture. How that, sadly, effects the way we work as a Party and so the activities and influence of our MEPs is not properly translated into the way we campaign. I hope we can do better during this year’s European elections.

This content was originally posted on my old Process Guy blog.