Brussels, 30/10/2003 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday Silvio Berlusconi had a one and a half hour meeting with Tony Blair in Downing Street. The latter confirmed his hostility to the extension of qualified majority to areas such as taxation, and his preference for a Foreign Affairs Minister attached to the European Council. On European defence, Messrs Berlusconi and Blair again insisted on complementarity with NATO. "We shouldn't be seen as being dogmatic" with regard to the request by the "small" countries of the EU to have a Commissioner in the future European Union" declared Chancellor Schröder to the press on Wednesday during a visit to Bratislava.
In an interview with the Secretary General of the Finnish Parliament in the daily paper, Kannuun Sanomat, Seppo Tiitinen recently indicated that some provisions in the constitutional treaty might require a revision of the Finnish Constitution. This involves the bridging clause that enables, by a decision of the European Council, to move from unanimity to qualified majority. Such a provision sill be contrary to the obligation for ratifying any decision having an impact on the transfer of competencies. the possible simplified procedure of part 3 of the treaty would pose the same problem but, notes an forewarned observer, opposition at the IGC in several Member States to these two provision would be revision of the Finnish Constitution useless.
A stinging decision by British Liberal Democrat, Andrew Duff, MEP and former Convention Member on the work of the Intergovernmental Conference, "the IGC, as expected, is just a duplication of the work of the Convention but is of inferior quality…Governments are putting forward arguments that were or have been integrated into the final Convention package or set aside as they were considered as being not very practical or in the common interest of the Union in their entirety". In a press statement, Mr Duff gave a warning, "the individual efforts of the sectoral Councils are not all welcome. The reactionary proposals of the Ecofin council…, which would have abolished parliamentary control over the EU budget and would have disallowed governments choosing selectively from the Treaty of Nice. The Convention clearly received the mandate to re-negotiate the whole package or else it did not".