Trading Europe these are at four hello everybody and welcome to my November blog from Strasbourg first of all I'd like to say a very big thank you to all of those who have contacted me with concern about how I'm very in Brussels this week obviously with all the news of lockdown people are concerned good news is we're not in Brussels this week it's as a Strasburg week but of course some of my staff are and they report to me that it is a strange and surreal experience given the fact that the stree
ts are fairly empty the Parliament is still operating it's not one of the public entities that's closed down although many people are working from home but as of next week the whole Parliament will be back in Brussels and it will be business as usual business as usual i think is important because if we cut back on our activities if we change the way that we operate our democracies both in the european parliament and indeed in national parliaments across europe will be giving a signal the terrori
sm has one that they are capable of making us change our behavior okay we're going to change our behavior a little towards security it's clearly tightened up it cements and really big changes here in Strasbourg because of course strasbourg in france the whole of France is on alert but it it that's what we need to do to protect ourselves and importantly to protect our staff but we don't need to shut down we don't need to close off our democracy we are an open democracy and we must make sure that
we maintain those principles if we don't then they have one and the message from the European Parliament's we don't often have a completely united message but the message on this one is united and it is we will not be defeated by people who don't share our way of life who don't understand our values and don't share our espera so having said that you can imagine a lot of activity this month on the subject not just of our personal security that's almost incidental but on how we're going to make su
re that Europe remains an open society how we're going to make sure that Europe remains United and we can make sure that terrorism does not thrive we know that we have homegrown terrorists both in France in Belgium in the UK it's clear and in other countries and we have a piece of legislation going through the parliament this week which is about how we tackle the fundamentalism that's growing within our own populations this has been reported by Rasheeda Dottie who is a center-right MEP from Fran
ce so not part of president Orleans ruling party but the opposition and I don't know if any of you saw the piece on Rashida in The Times last week she has ambitions way beyond the European Parliament in French politics so an interesting lady to watch interesting as well because of her background which is north african mas and from the Muslim community in North Africa but very much an integrated member of French society and some very interesting ideas on which we largely agree in her report so I
commend that to you if you're going online have a look at it and you'll see some pretty sensible stuff there apart from the security issues which I have to say has rather dominated this week very interesting one for me in a subject which I often speak about is animal welfare there's a motion to Parliament on animal welfare asking the Commission to come forward with new rules and it's a very good illustration here of how we conservatives operate in Europe because we're not actually agreeing with
that we don't want new rules but we're very clear that that doesn't mean to say that we're not interested in animal welfare of course we are in fact I believe the UK is at the forefront of welfare particularly in agricultural practices but what we're saying is we want to enforce the rules that we already have we already have probably the most far-reaching rules on particular an agricultural animal welfare in the world if only all member states were one hundred percent implementing those rules so
what we're saying is come on EU make sure the rules you already have a followed everywhere but it's a level playing field get that bedded get that working and then maybe we talk about augmenting it but until we do we simply cannot agree that we need to have morals which people will ignore so that's the situation here in Strasburg I wish you all a very happy and and good rest of November and look forward to speaking to you just before Christmas
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