Europe Minister criticises David Cameron during visit to University

27th Nov 2009

New Europe Min­is­ter and MP Chris Bryant blasted David Cameron, describ­ing him as a ‘fraud’, dur­ing his visit to the Uni­ver­sity of Birm­ing­ham last week.

Bryant’s attack on Cameron came dur­ing an inter­view with Red­brick after he held a talk in the Law School dis­cussing Britain’s options within the Euro­pean Union.

The new Europe Min­is­ter, Labour’s 12th in as many years, was here to pro­mote his belief that ‘Britain’s best inter­est is lying in Europe’ and demon­strated that despite Con­ser­v­a­tive com­ments to the con­trary, the Labour Gov­ern­ment does take the issue of Europe seriously.

The for­mer Chair of the Chris­t­ian Social­ist Move­ment, who has been an MP for Rhondda since 2001, has come under crit­i­cism for express­ing a require­ment for a Pres­i­dent of Euro­pean Coun­cil and his belief that Tony Blair would be the right man for the job. Bryant expressed his want for a Pres­i­dent by explain­ing that Europe needed to com­mu­ni­cate bet­ter with China and the United States amongst other world pow­ers, and jus­ti­fied his per­sonal choice for Pres­i­dent due to Blairs world recog­nised name.

Bryant spoke of the ‘enor­mous’ oppor­tu­ni­ties that lay in the new coun­tries recently added to the Euro­pean Union, such as Hun­gary, and aimed to attract stu­dents to learn­ing a mod­ern for­eign lan­guage by not­ing the extra £15,000 a year one could have added to their earn­ings for being bilingual.

A mod­ern MP, who uses the likes of Twit­ter to com­mu­ni­cate with his 745 fol­low­ers, Bryant is in favour of amend­ing the pol­i­tics sys­tem to erad­i­cate safe seat con­stituen­cies and reform­ing the House of Lords. On the other hand he is against a ref­er­en­dum over Europe pre­fer­ring the Gov­ern­ment not to engage in direct democ­racy with the vot­ers unlike what the Con­ser­v­a­tives want.

Dur­ing the expenses scan­dal ear­lier in the year, Bryant was accused of ‘flip­ping’ his sec­ond home twice in two years which gained him £20,000 in expenses. Accord­ing to the The Daily Tele­graph From June 2004 to May 2009, he had claimed a total of £92,415 in sec­ond home expenses. He denies abus­ing the sys­tem and said that ‘MPs should not set their own pay or expenses, end of story’. He also stated that an inde­pen­dent body should be in charge of such things to ensure no-one can take advan­tage of the situation.

Bryant was doing a tour of the Mid­lands when he breezed through cam­pus last week.

For more infor­ma­tion visit www.chrisbryant.co.uk.