David Martin's EU Tribune

If we were planning to create a European Union today, the two policies that probably would not be common policies would be farming and fishing. We only have the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) and the CFP (Common Fisheries Policy) because historical contingency – food dependency during the Second World War. Both the CAP and the [...]

One of the main purposes of creating the entity now known as the European Union was to make any future war between France and Germany, or any other Member State, impossible. In that aim the European Union is spectacularly successful – it is one of the major achievement s in the history of mankind. So [...]

Socrates advised his listeners to seek the ‘Good Life’ – but what is it? Oxfam Scotland has been trying to find this out and I am proud to have been part of the working group that commissioned the Oxfam Humankind Index which tries to gauge the answer to this perennial question.. Even though it is [...]

These were the words of Anthony Lake, executive director of UNICEF reported in BBC online yesterday. He was talking about the 382 deaths worldwide from measles every day after an analysis published in the Lancet showed global efforts to cut the number of deaths from measles had fallen short of World Health Organization (WHO) targets. [...]

On Friday the coalition government presented its proposals to reform the European Court of Human Rights. Unsurprisingly, there is little that is progressive about the government’s approach. The UK currently holds the Presidency of the Council of Europe and has used the summit last week in the liberal city of Brighton to present its very [...]

2012 is the International Year of Co-operatives and this week marks the main event of the year at a European level. Europe has 160,000 cooperatives, owned by more than a quarter of all Europeans, providing work for around 5.4 million employees. In declaring 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives the United Nations was encouraging [...]

It has been recently been claimed that: ‘…the golden years of international aid commitment is over’. Preliminary figures released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s development assistance committee, detailing aid flows to poor countries in 2011, might suggest so. Global official development assistance dropped by $3.5bn to $129.4bn between 2010 and 2011, a [...]

A brand new EU position of “Human Rights Czar” will be given the approval of the European Parliament as it votes today (Wednesday 18 April) to back a major report seeking to change the future direction of the EU’s human rights policy. My Labour Colleague Richard Howitt MEP, who has led the campaign for the [...]

At the end of last month an overwhelming majority of MEPs voted to end the monthly trek from Brussels to Strasbourg. The sitting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg instead of Brussels was part of a protocol attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam (agreed by John Major as British Prime Minister) and decided on by [...]

In the European Parliament we are witnessing an ongoing backlash against high pay in the banking sector in the wake of the global financial crisis. It is the belief of a majority of MEPs, including those from the Right, that bankers’ bonuses should be strictly limited. New proposals have been put forward by members of [...]