This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Claude Morais.

Claude Morais is a British Labour member of the European Parliament and chairman of the

Civil Liberties Justice and Home Affairs Committee.

Claude, you've been a member of the European Parliament for almost 17 years now.

You must have seen many changes over that time.

But I want to talk about, in particular, the last 18 months since the Juncker Commission took office.

One of its mantras, as you know, was to do less but to do it better,

which meant, to some extent, a process of deregulation, maybe better regulation,

fewer proposals coming out

to the commission and into the european parliament what does that impact has had on the european

parliament in terms of its workload i think it's made the european parliament a very different kind

of place the type of parliament i came into in 1999 was one where there was a big emphasis on legislation. The Environment Committee

was a kind of sausage machine for legislation. The Employment Committee poured out new legislation,

much of it quite well known. And committees like the Internal market committee pioneered new consumer legislation.

It really was a different time.

The last 18 months I've seen a change of culture and emphasis,

but I think in my view that that has been an inevitable and proper change because

you can't legislate for the sake of it and the European Union should only legislate on those

things that it's appropriate to legislate on and national governments should be doing what it's appropriate for national governments to be doing.

So the emphasis to switch to better regulation and issues of soft power, the things that the Parliament can do,

which are non-legislative, has certainly seen a change in emphasis.

Well, before we come on to the soft power you talk about, let's go back to the brief,

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