A decalogue for a new (EPP-ED) era

In the echoing faded glories of the Concert Noble hall in Brussels, Joseph Daul, leader of the centre-right EPP-ED group in the European Parliament, presided at the launch of the group's policy priorities last Tuesday (4 March). Just below him on the billing were ‘some of the main political players of the EPP-ED family': Hans-Gert Pottering, president of the Parliament, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Wilfried Martens, president of the European Peoples Party. Together they delivered ten policy priorities – audaciously presented as ‘The Decalogue'. MEPs currently searching their consciences about assistants' allowance payments were, however, spared any embarrassment from old-fashioned injunctions such as “thou shalt not covet” and “thou shalt not bear false witness”. The cuddly EPP-ED update explains that its ten principles “are grouped around our four main themes for a better Europe: a Europe of values, growth, security and solidarity”.

Apparently that solidarity does not extend across the whole of the EPP-ED group. Two days later James Elles, a British Conservative MEP, wrote to Daul submitting his resignation as chairman of the European Ideas Network. This in-house think-tank was set up by the group in 2002 as a sop to the British Conservatives, offering the comfortable delusion that they could influence the EPP-ED agenda. It has since then been ridiculed as “not European, not a network and with no ideas”. But Elles clearly sees things differently. In his letter to Daul he complained that “the recent elaboration of a ‘decalogue' of the group priorities for the future took no account of EIN work in any way”. “It was as if the Network did not exist,” he wrote, adding that “I can no longer justify to the several hundred people...that they should continue to devote their free time to help us develop new thinking.” Daul must have had something else in mind when he declared that: “The EPP-ED group considers internal cohesion to be fundamental.”