Stitch-up? Now France excludes Britain from special talks on EU farm spending
France has triggered a fresh row over EU power-broking by excluding Britain from key-Europe wide talks on the future of farm subsidies to be held in Paris this week.
By Kim Willsher in Paris and Patrick Hennessy, Political Editor
Published: 8:15AM GMT 06 Dec 2009
The French government has summoned a meeting of what it called the "G22" - senior ministers from 22 European states - in an attempt to influence a rethink of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
However, it has not invited Britain or other so-called "reform nations" - the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Malta - all of which have argued for a full overhaul of EU farm subsidies.
Bruno Le Maire, the French agriculture minister, said the aim was to "produce a battle plan to defend a strong common agriculture policy, to support a renewed CAP."
The snub follows hard on the heels of rows over the appointment of Michel Barnier, himself a former French agriculture minister, to the key role as the EU's commissioner for the internal market - which will give him potentially sweeping powers over the City of London.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has hailed the appointment as a triumph for France and claimed that the British are the "big losers" from the shake-up of EU commissioners' posts. Last week he cancelled a planned trip to London after an angry Gordon Brown refused to fit in a meeting with him.
At the European Council in December 2005 Tony Blair negotiated away around 20 per cent – or £7.2 billion – of the rebate Britain would have received from the EU over the period 2007 to 2013. As part of the "deal", Britain received promises of cuts to the CAP subsidies paid to farmers. However, these have not so far been forthcoming, and now the French government in particular is digging in its heels as negotiations over the next six-year budget are about to begin.
Mr Le Maire said: "It is time to produce a battle plan to defend a strong common agriculture policy, to support a renewed CAP. Work on this has to start as quickly as possible. The whole point of this meeting in Paris is to show our attachment to the CAP, our attachment to the tools of European regulation that are the only thing capable of guaranteeing the future of European agriculture, and to show that we are capable of imagination and daring."
Senior British government sources last night expressed surprise and concern over the meeting of the "G22" - which is outside the formal umbrella of the EU and is being billed as a "reflection" on the future of the CAP.
But the Conservatives said news of the talks was further proof that Gordon Brown's government was being outmanoeuvred within the EU by the French. William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said: "In return for giving up £7 billion or our rebate we were promised a fundamental review of the whole EU budget, including the CAP. We hope to see the European Commission's proposals for that reform officially published soon.
"It's important that the Commission does not allow itself to be nobbled by countries with vested interests. The EU needs a modern budget for the 21st century, not one stuck with the spending priorities of the 1960s. Ministers need to wake up and start making the case for change to our partners.
"While the French are pro-actively advancing their interests in Europe this Labour Government is yet again failing to exercise leadership."
As he crowed over his successes last week, Mr Sarkozy only raised anxiety in London further by promising that the 57-year-old Mr Barnier would rein in the "free-wheeling Anglo-Saxon model" of banking - a remark which reverberated around a nervous City of London.
Allies of Mr Barnier, who is renowned for his charm and courtesy, defend him from the suggestion that he is now the most dangerous man Britain faces in Europe - and he himself insisted in a French radio interview last week: "I'm not an ideologist. I'm very practical. Everybody needs to calm down."
Yet whatever his true intentions towards Britain's financial industry, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that Mr Barnier expects to continue to exercise great influence over the EU's farming policy as well as over Europe's financial institutions.
As France's agriculture minister last year, Mr Barnier obtained the agreement of 24 out of 27 EU countries that the CAP's generous subsidies would remain in broadly their current form - against the wishes of Britain.
"The CAP will continue after 2013," he told Le Figaro newspaper at the time, admitting Britain had opposed his plan. He added: "Right to the end I tried to get the British to swallow it, but in vain."
On a previous occasion he said: "There are those in Europe who no longer want the CAP. Clearly that's an Anglo-Saxon vision but it isn't ours. Our allies are Poland, Italy, Spain, who are the big agricultural nations and who have the same problems as us."
As agriculture minister he staunchly defended the massive subsidies to France from the EU budget - and last year urged Africa and Latin America to copy Europe and set up their own versions of the CAP.
He now has a perfect opportunity to push his views on European farms policy through his friendship with the new EU agriculture commissioner, Dacian Ciolos, 40, a Romanian technocrat who has spent so much of his life studying and working in France that he regards it as his adoptive country.
Mr Ciolos, whose wife is French, has been nicknamed the "second French commissioner" by newspapers in Paris and Bucharest.
He studied agriculture in Rennes, is a fan of the French system of farm subsidies and production - and is also a friend of Mr Barnier.
"The second victory is that our friends, the Romanians, have agriculture," Mr Sarkozy boasted after learning that his discreet lobbying for Mr Ciolos' appointment had borne fruit.
While considering his stance on reform of the CAP, which in any case benefits backward Romanian farmers more than most in Europe, Mr Ciolos will have a powerful voice whispering in his ear: that of Mr Barnier.
Mr Barnier told French reporters that he would be keeping the work of his colleagues, and particularly Mr Ciolos, whom he cited by name, under close watch.
"It is a duty to participate and be interested in what others do," he said. "He (Ciolos) will be independent but I will give him my opinion."
In case Mr Ciolos was uncertain of that, Mr Barnier added that he saw it as essential to "preserve farm regulations, because feeding people is not a service like any other."
The fact that the two men are friends and hold similar pro-regulation and pro-subsidy views on European agriculture reveals just how skilfully the French president played his cards over the Commission appointments.
While Gordon Brown expended political capital championing the lost political cause of Tony Blair for the new post of European Council president, then "triumphed" by securing the high profile but almost powerless job of "high representative for foreign affairs" for the previously little-known Labour peer Baroness Ashton, Mr Sarkozy was engaged in a more subtle game.
Now it is clear that France has secured two of the posts most likely to cause irritation - and, quite possibly, damage - to Britain.
So what is Mr Barnier really like, and what does he believe?
Friends say that he has a motto of which he likes to remind himself when the going gets tough: "Stay professional and stay pleasant." One friend said: "That is a bit Boy Scout-ish - but he's like that."
Last week Mr Barnier told French radio that the British reaction to his appointment had been "very exaggerated". "I know the importance of the City of London, I know the major importance of this financial institution for the growth of the United Kingdom and the whole European economy," he said.
He declined to give any British media interviews to help quell the alarm in London, but agreed to accept three emailed questions from The Sunday Telegraph.
His replies were diplomatically bland. Asked what "Anglo-Saxon" banking had to learn from the French or European model, he responded: "I'm not going to give lessons to anyone. Together, we need to learn lessons from this crisis. We all have something to learn from it."
He declined to say whether he would back a possible EU-wide tax, a controversial option that has been floated by the European Council's newly-installed president, Herman van Rompuy.
Asked his views on reducing the size of the CAP for the EU's next budget period, he said this was for the new Commission to discuss. "Of course, like all my fellow Commissioners, I will participate," he added.
Colleagues say that he bristles at the idea of being branded Mr Sarkozy's poodle in Brussels, maintaining that he will be bound by oath to be independent.
Yet the beauty of his appointment, from the Elysee Palace's point of view, is that he already shares much of Mr Sarkozy's outlook on Europe and the world.
Originally from the Savoie area of the Alps, Mr Barnier has been active in the right-wing Gaullist movement - named after the wartime leader and subsequent president, General de Gaulle - since he was 15. A career politician, he graduated from one of France's elite "grande école" business schools in 1972 and six years later was elected to the French national assembly becoming, at 27, the country's youngest MP.
He has served as a European commissioner for regional policy from 1999 until 2004 - and in the French government, as environment minister, European affairs secretary and foreign minister.
Some consider him a committed federalist - "federalist to the fingertips" was how one Eurosceptic critic put it. But friends put it differently. He believes strongly in the nation state, but argues with equal force that nations must serve the wider European good. "He approaches everything as a committed European," one friend said.
Mr Barnier supports the idea of a "Franco-German" tandem leading Europe and said of the alliance in an interview with Politique Internationale in 2005, reproduced on the website of the French Embassy in London: "When it doesn't work, nothing much works."
He served just over a year aas French foreign minister before being replaced following the country's "no" vote to the revised European Constitution in 2005. When Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in 2007 he returned to favour and was appointed agriculture minister. He headed the list of candidates for Mr Sarkozy's right wing UMP party for the European Parliament elections earlier this year.
A jazz lover, his wife Isabelle is an adviser to the French health minister, and they have three children in their twenties.
The sudden advancement of his friend, Mr Ciolos, who will manage around 55 billion euros in European farm subsidies in the 2010 budget, is a triumph for Mr Barnier's view of France's role in Europe.
During one spell in government, he said one of his aims was to secure "a French presence in all central, eastern and Baltic European countries". The appointment of Mr Ciolos seems to have proved the benefits to France of that approach. Whether there is benefit to Britain is another matter.
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