Jim Murphy

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Wednesday 12 March, 2008

At the end of last week, less than 24 hours after having voted against a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the House of Commons, I was in Paris to talk about how we can get Europe to do more on climate change, the economy, security and many other things that we and the French are working really hard on.

I also visited the Equitess community project in Val de Fontanay, a Paris suburb, which is aimed at giving people the skills they need to get back to work. It's been put together with some European money and a lot of goodwill and determination. It's an inspirational project, and there are ideas here that we could possibly learn from.

I talked to the French Europe Minister, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, about this and many other issues when we met on Friday. You can see a video taken during our meeting here:

Written transcript

Here I am in Paris with Jean-Pierre Jouyet, my good friend and French Minister for Europe. We have had lunch and just had a press conference to go through all the big issues facing Europe and France which is so important to the United Kingdom.

President Sarkozy will be in the United Kingdom later this month and also France will be the President of the European Union later this year and that's why I was here with Jean-Pierre.

We had such a detailed conversation about things like Climate Change, International Security and the Economy. But you have heard enough from me on this by this diary I just want to pass over to Jean-Pierre to give his reflections on what we have spoken about.

Yes I think that it was a very good meeting it's always a pleasure to have a meeting with Jim in Paris.

I want to tell you before that I'm very happy of the outcome of the debate in the House of Commons about the ratification of the Treaty and we were very appreciate of the role that Jim played in this vote in Parliament, it's very good news for UK, it's very good news for Europe and I am also to tell that I am very happy between French and the United Kingdom now we act in the spirit of confidence we share many common goals about the fight against Global Warming, about the International Security, about also the role that the member states have to play in Europe and to play to have Europe stronger in the globalisation and last but not the least spoke about football because we have common appetite for football. I know that Jim had no time to see the match because he was very busy with the parliament during this week but we want also to try to work on the sport and the impact of sport in social cohesion for the youth and so on and very good as usual to have this kind of very friendly meeting with Jim.