CentreRight

Russia's use of gas as a diplomatic weapon by totally and unilaterally interrupting its gas flow to Ukraine has once again proved why we need a common EU external energy security policy. Also why we need to diversify our own energy sources both geographically and the mix, as we currently only import less than 5% of our gas currently from Russia compared to the EU average of 25%, but this is predicted to grow. Whenever the words 'common' and 'EU' are mentioned in the same sentence they tend to provoke apoplexy among many Eurosceptics. However, David Cameron is in favour of such an EU policy, not only for its obvious benefits of minimising our exposure to Russian strong-arm tactics but for the impetus that it will provide to the green agenda - and, dare I say it, to a potential renaissance of nuclear energy in the UK which has the added advantage of meeting our Kyoto targets.

I had the privilege of a ringside seat during the heady days of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, when people power thwarted efforts by the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich to steal the election. It was clear to me then, as it is now, that Ukraine is determined to emerge from Russia's shadow to force its own future as part of the Euroatlantic structures. Shortly after my most recent visit to Ukraine in October last year I posted an article that provoked some interesting debate and prompted a few contributors to dismiss Ukraine as entirely irrelevant. The events of the past two weeks are proof alone of how misguided and myopic that view is. Ukraine is a large and strategic European country which Russia would be delighted to get back under its sphere of influence.

There is no doubt in my mind that Russia although also motivated by getting a better financial deal for its gas to Ukraine is bullying Ukraine and trying to destabilise the government ahead of the presidential election next year. President Yushchenko in turn has not been keen for Prime Minister Tymoshenko to close a deal with the Russians and take credit for it as she is running against him for the Presidency. The difference this time from the previous occasion on which Russia partly turned off the taps for a few days is that much of southern and eastern Europe has also been cut off as the flow has been reduced to nil creating a national crisis in countries like Bulgaria and Slovakia totally dependent on Gazprom supplies and unlike Ukraine itself with only limited reserve storage capacities to tide them over. Matters are exacerbated by both Russia and Ukraine feeling the credit crunch and in the case of Russia because of the unexpected collapse in oil prices it is desperate with its dwindling foreign exchange reserves to get the best long term deal. The EU has therefore reluctanctly been dragged into this row not as an external observer, although initially it had foolishly said it was a bilateral Russia-Ukraine spat, but as a collateral victim of the Kremlin's gas diplomacy. The Czech Prime Minister has had to fly to Moscow to knock heads together as the EU is Russia´s biggest commercial customer and finalise a deal to turn supplies of gas back on again.

My recent article outlining my concerns about Conservative MEPs sitting as unattached members in the European Parliament sparked off a furious debate, much of which was distinctly off-thread. This article is intended as a follow-up, but first I need to address some of the comments and set a few things straight.

I have no inside knowledge about this issue at all - MEPs are kept very much in the dark about David Cameron's plans, apart from the leader Timothy Kirkhope and the MEP tasked with making contacts with potential partners, Geoffrey Van Orden. I am a loyal supporter of our party leader and a loyal Conservative - I have no intention of defecting to any other party, as per a ludicrous accusation from a nameless contributor. I have signed the pledge to do what Cameron tells us to do and I will respect that pledge. I was not intending to say that Tory MEPs should, out of principle, remain part of the EPP-ED - I have never said that. And I have certainly not been put up by anyone, least of all the new Tory MEPs' delegation leader Timothy Kirkhope, to float views or options on behalf of anyone. I enjoy free and frank debate on party policy but without invective or gratuitous insults.

If we as a party aspire to government, and if David Cameron aspires to lead Britain as an active member of the European Union, it is not a good idea for Conservative MEPs to sit as unattached members in the European Parliament. This outcome has been mooted many times, and is still under consideration by  senior people in the party as a worst-case scenario in the event that plans to form a new group come to nothing. However, I fear that such a move would be damaging and counter-productive.

All MEPs standing for re-election and all new candidates have signed a pledge to adhere to David Cameron's direction with regard to the formation of a new group. I am not familiar with the latest developments on the creation of a new group involving Conservatives and our Czech partners, ODS. However, conversations at party conference in Birmingham six weeks ago have confirmed in my mind that sitting as unattached members (known in Brussels as 'non-inscrit') remains one of the options on the table.

Personally, I have never been opposed in principle to leaving the EPP-ED, provided we can develop a group that reflects our party's political interests and that enables Conservative MEPs to retain influence in the parliament. However, I have trouble understanding how sitting as unattached members would enhance our party's standing - and such a move would reduce our influence to zero. Conservatives would be barred from serving as chairmen or vice-chairmen of committeees, tabling or negotiating resolutions of the parliament, submitting amendments to legislation without collecting 40 signatures or authoring any significant reports.

I've recently returned from Ukraine, a country I've visited many times in the past. The occasion this time was the eleventh EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, of which I am vice-chairman. The meeting came at what is a critical juncture in Ukraine's nascent democracy which has been marked in recent years by a political reorientation away from Russia and towards the West.

It has always surprised me that until now Ukraine has not figured more prominently in mainstream foreign policy thinking, both within our party and within the government. When I first visited the country after my election in 1999 I quickly realised that my then colleague Robert Goodwill and I were almost alone among elected Conservatives in taking an interest in Ukraine and its future.

It is true that the Conservative Party was the first major centre-right party in the 'old' member states of the EU to champion Ukraine's membership of the Union, and the Labour government has also recently supported Ukraine's aspirations. But this has been from a geopolitical rather than a geostrategic point of view – a belief that Ukraine qualified for EU membership on the basis of geography and history rather than a realisation of the crucial importance of anchoring Ukraine to the West in the long term.

Yesterday in the European Parliament I spoke in the monthly debates on human rights that take place at the end of each plenary session (which would have taken place in Strasbourg had the building's roof not caved in). These debates, known as 'urgencies', highlight issues of major concern around the world and cover a wide spectrum: recent topics have included Japanese comfort women, the recent coup in Mauritania and the bizarre murders of albino people in Tanzania for their body parts to be used to make potions.

One country, however, features disproportionately in these monthly debates. I have lost count of the number of times we have denounced Iran's brutal theocratic regime and its appalling human rights record. And of the many issues that MEPs have sought to highlight, the abritrary and disproportionate application of judicial execution under sharia law is the one that concerns us the most in these human rights debates.

I should say at this stage that I do not support the general thrust of the EU's approach to the death penalty, which is universal abolition. Execution should be a matter of sovereign governments to decide and I can accept that there are times when it may be an appropriate way to do justice for the most heinous crimes. However, in democratic countries that still execute criminals (the main ones being the US, India and Japan) there are generally accepted civilised and humane standards for the administration of capital punishment. Moreover, the death penalty is generally only carried out on adults proven guilty beyond all doubt of aggravated murder and following lengthy due process and appeals.

Iran, on the other hand, takes a very liberal approach to what constitutes a capital crime. The execution of juveniles is commonplace, and indeed formed the basis of yesterday's debate and resolution. It's also common for juveniles to be convicted of crimes and sent to prison in the sure knowledge that they will be executed on their eighteenth birthday. The method of execution most frequently employed - slow hanging, often from a crane - is especially barbaric. Among sovereign states only the People's Reublic of China, which has a population seventeen times that of Iran, executes more people every year. Iran blatantly disregards the fact that it is a signatory to UN conventions on the rights of the child prohibiting executions of juveniles.

People are put to death in Iran for what countries like Britain would consider to be trivial offences, or not even offences at all, such as consensual homosexual sex and adultery. Such cases are known in Iran as 'crimes of sexual chastity'. I remember vividly a similar debate a few years ago that highlighted the case of a mentally ill teenage girl, Ateqeh Rajabi, executed for having sex outside marriage. Apostasy also carries a mandatory death sentence.

The regime in Tehran seems to gain a perverse pleasure in shocking the outside world and inviting its opprobrium. Sadly the barbarity of Iran's application of the death penalty no longer shocks me but still disgusts me, and despite the fact that our resolution will be forwarded to President Ahmedinejad, I doubt that he will lose any sleep over the matter.

The Conservative Party is officially opposed to the International Criminal Court. Britain is a member of the court, but we as a party have based our opposition to the court on the suspicion that it would be susceptible to malicious prosecutions and political manipulation. The governments of the United States, India, Russia and China have not signed the Rome statute establishing the ICC. The Conservatives are one of only two centre-right parties in the EU not to support the ICC, the other being the ODS, our sister party in the Czech Republic and future partner in a new European Parliament group.

I wrote for the Wall Street Journal on this subject six years ago to outline my concerns about the court. I can't say I've experienced a Damascene conversion in the meantime because international criminal jurisprudence is largely untried and untested, and many questions are still left to be answered. But in the past few years the court has begun its work and the politically motivated prosecutions that I and others feared have not come to pass. I don't agree with my colleague Dan Hannan, who thinks that the ICC is a threat to democracy, although I can see where he, as a sovereignist, is coming from.

What has really caused me to think about our party's opposition to the ICC is the court's recent indictment of President al-Bashir of Sudan for the alleged genocide in Darfur. Our party surely welcomes moves to bring this brutal dictator to justice, but such a position sits somewhat uneasily with out principled objection to the ICC. What was especially interesting to me was the way in which the United States - still resolutely opposed to the ICC - has effectively validated the court's mission by guiding this whole issue through the UN Security Council, even though Sudan is not a member of the ICC either.

I have already set out some of my ideas about the limitations of an ethical foreign policy on this site. Indeed, the ethics of the ICC's decision have been called into question by some, even within the UN, for risking the wrath of President Bashir and the subsequent further weakening of the UNAMID peacekeeping force, thereby exposing vulnerable civilians to further atrocities. We cannot allow our vital national interests to be compromised by the ICC or any other international body for that matter. But we should also recognise that perhaps the ICC has a role in supporting and furthering our national interests.

There is no doubt in my mind that international criminal justice is viable and appropriate for the most egregious crimes against humanity, for which impunity should never apply (although justice can also happen through the 'truth and reconciliation' model of disclosure and amnesty). Whether the ICC as currently constituted is the right forum to develop this field of jurisprudence remains to be seen. But I think we should take heart from the ICC's history so far and be prepared to change our party's position, subject of course to a tightening of the statutes relating to command responsibility and other areas of genuine concern. An international conference to review the Rome statute is scheduled to take place at some point after July 2009, when we may be in government, so it's time the party did some serious thinking on this issue. Are we saying unequivocally that Britain under a Conservative government will withdraw from the ICC?

Foreign policy is an ethical minefield - or at least it should be. The crusading left-wing journalist John Pilger once wrote about an interview he conducted with the late Alan Clark MP, who was then defence minister. Pilger repeatedly asked Clark why he wasn't bothered that Britain was supplying arms to the Indonesian regime occupying and suppressing East Timor. Pilger told Clark that he found this strange in a man who practiced vegetarianism and defended the rights of animals. Clark failed to see any contradiction. But in his parliamentary renaissance in the late 1990s, Clark was outspoken and almost alone on the Tory benches in his condemnation of NATO's bombing of Serbia.

I quote this episode not only to highlight the refreshing bluntness and free thinking of my former MP, but to support my view that in ethical foreign policy - which was supposedly Labour's policy at the time of the NATO attacks on Serbia - there is rarely agreement as to how ethical concerns should be applied in practice.

Of course, there are always going to be times when 'national interest' or 'realpolitik', nebulous though that term often is, will trump concerns about ethics. One such occasion was the visit in October 2007 of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to the UK. The visit was not long after Tony Blair personally scrapped a Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged corruption over Saudi arms deals. Foreign Office minister Kim Howells rather absurdly lauded Saudi Arabia and Britain's 'shared values'.

As a political issue, biodiesel has oscillated sharply on the agenda between preference and pariah in the past few years. This fluctuation is interesting, not least in the context of David Cameron's emphasis on environmental protection. Whereas biofuels were once seen as a panacea for the world's unsustainable consumption of fossil fuels, they are now seen as a potential agent of expensive food at best and mass starvation at worst. Also, some experts have put forward claims that the cycle of biofuel production actually produces more carbon dioxide that it would save. Nothing could illustrate this to me more clearly than the deluge of emails I have received from environmental activists demanding that I do not vote to increase the EU's target for biodiesel as a proportion of road transport fuel, which is currently ten per cent by 2020. Interestingly the environment committee of the European Parliament has just passed an amendment reducing the target to four per cent.

The comments of my former MEP colleague and shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers were spot on in this respect. Clearly the government has been very slow to react to changing circumstances, and not for the first time. Undoubtedly the zealous pursuit of ambitious biodiesel targets has led to deforestation in sensitive ecological zones and may have caused a spike in food prices for consumers around the world, but most seriously in developing countries (however, in my personal view, increased consumption in the growing economies of China and India accounts for the bulk of the rise). It is for that reason that Conservative MEPs, led by our environment spokesman John Bowis, will be voting against the Commission package.

An embracing enthusiasm for free trade is one of the defining characteristics of the modern Tory party but it was not always thus. Traditionally Liberals adopted a more laissez-faire approach to external commerce and Tories tended towards protectionism, at least until the landmark Corn Law repeal of the 1840s.

In recent years particularly after the phenomenal success of the Thatcherite reforms some in the party, and in the conservative movement in general, have swung radically the other way towards unfettered and unregulated - some would call it pure unrestricted free trade. This purism has become an ideological and zealous badge of honour in some quarters.

I am in favour of organised and well controlled free trade. It has made our country one of the most sophisticated, resilient and diverse market economies in the world. There is also a strong moral case to be made for free trade and its capacity to make poor countries wealthier by incentivating local competition and change. But equally there are moral pitfalls when free trade is allowed to run riot.

Election campaigning is a bit like painting the Forth bridge: once you've finished one campaign you have to start all over again. The election cycle is such that there is rarely a moment to take stock. And now the party must look ahead to the European elections in 2009.

After our success in the local and London mayoral elections a couple of months ago it would be tempting to think that we will enjoy the same performance next year. It would also be fatally complacent because so much can happen in that time. Preparation and discipline will be vital.

First, we should draw a line under the thorny issue of MEP selection and the changes made that brought in top-listing and the regional selection colleges. ConHome has pursued this issue energetically and with typical determination but we must put it behind us. Of course, there will be those who consider the changes an unpardonable slight on members' rights. Some people have even left the party over the issue. But opening up sores like this is exactly what our political opponents - and the press - want to see, namely a party fixated on Europe and prone to eternal bickering on the matter.

Second, sitting MEPs must now do what the party's compliance officer Hugh Thomas deems necessary to meet public concerns about abuse of expenses. We cannot afford to have this albatross of repeated allegations of impropriety hanging over our necks in the run-up to polling day. Candidates on the European regional lists who are not MEPs must also be made fully aware of the new appetite for scrutiny that they will face. As David Cameron said, it's not about whether you've broken the rules, it's about whether you've acted contrary to the spirit of the rules.