European Parliament may have lost its IT expertise

The UK was stripped of its hi-tech MEPs in this month's European elections, according to one angry candidate - who was voted out.

Christine Oddy, former MEP for Coventry, claims there is nobody left to represent UK business on IT issues. She masterminded the ecommerce directive, but was voted out of Brussels this month, along with fellow IT expert, Ian White, former MEP for Bristol.

Tech-literate MEPs are needed for the legal affairs committee, which reconvenes in mid-July to pick up the threads of the ecommerce directive.

Oddy claims there are now no Labour MEPs who understand both IT and law and that this will give ecommerce laws a consumer bias, as non-expert MEPs tend to adopt policies that will please their electorate.

"There's no-one to follow in my footsteps in the European Parliamentary Labour Party," she told Silicon.com. "They lost 100 per cent of their legal expertise when Ian and I were voted out."

Oddy stood - and lost - as an independent candidate, after long-term disagreements with the Labour Party provoked her to resign, just before the election.

A Labour Party spokesman commented: "We lost some very good people across a range of sectors - people like Ian White who were committed to business and European partnerships."

Labour said Claude Moraes, new MEP for London, was their best replacement. But Moraes, although a trained lawyer, is former director of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and specialises in human rights, not IT.

Conservative MEPs are in no stronger position. Their most plausible IT expert is Lord Inglewood, former minister for broadcasting.

Oddy said that across parliament as a whole, the most likely MEP to carry on her work was German Socialist, Willi Rothley. But Rothley was slammed by industry last month, for proposing that Internet service providers be made responsible for online content.